How Is Glass Made?
Glass is used to make marbles, windows, milk bottles, cooking pots, mirrors, big doors for department stores, the picture tube in your television, light bulbs, car safety windows, computer screens and many other things. A recent application is to use glass fibers to transmit phone calls and to connect computer centers. There are many different kinds of glass and they are made in different manners. However, the main ingredient is sand. An ancient Egyptian recipe to make glass is to mix sand, lime and soda. This mixture is heated until it becomes a liquid. The Romans discovered in the first century BC that you can form thin bulbs of glass by gathering a blob of glass on the end of a long metal tube and then blowing into the tube, just like blowing bubble gum. This discovery was a big step towards making glass windows. You still can see glass blowers at work when you visit the Corning Museum of Glass. They use this method to make beautiful vases, bowls, and glass sculptures. When hot glas
Sand, soda ash, limestone, and borax are raw materials for glass making. These materials all are dry powders which look much alike, but are capable of producing greatly different results. They come to the glass plant in railroad cars and are stored in large silos. After they are carefully weighed and mechanically mixed in the proportions, the glass maker adds cullet. Cullet is either recycled glass or waste glass from a previous melt of the same kind of glass. The addition of cullet reduces the amount of heat needed to melt the new batch. After mixing, the batch goes to the melting units in batch cars, in hoppers, or on conveyor belts. Small quantities of optical glass, art glass and specialty glass are made in refractory pots. Larger quantities of glass are made in furnaces. The raw materials are fed into the loading end as rapidly as molten glass is removed from the working end. There are four main methods of shaping glass: blowing, pressing, drawing, and casting. After the shaping p
Toughened glass is made from normal, float glass. This page gives you all the details you need to know. Toughened glass starts life as float glass. Float glass, when shattered breaks into dagger like pieces and can be harmful, it is therefore unsuitable for some applications. Before undergoing the toughening process the glass parts must be cut to size. Any additional machining must be completed before the glass is toughened as it would shatter if it was cut in its toughened state. In the toughening process, the surfaces of the glass are heated in a furnace. Recommended temperatures vary but the glass reaches temperatures of over 600C. The hot glass is then cooled rapidly by a blast of air over a period of between 3 and 10 seconds. As a result, the surfaces shrink, and (at first) tensile stresses develop on the surfaces. As the bulk of the glass begins to cool, it contracts. The already solidified surfaces of the glass are then forced to contract, and consequently, they develop residual
Before man learned the secret of glassmaking, nature was the world’s only glassmaker. Lightning striking sand melted it into long, thin tubes of glass, and volcanoes erupting melted rocks and sand into glass. Man’s earliest glass was probably a glaze on ceramic pottery made somewhere around 3000 B.C. Today, three inexpensive ing
Glass is a common household object. It is an amorphous noncrystalline solid that has several applications in our daily lives. Glass is transparent to visible light. This makes it ideal for windows. Also, many common household items like drinking glasses, bowls, and bottles are made of glass. In laboratories, flasks and test tubes are also made of glass. Perhaps the most common use of glass is in the creation of mirrors. High-quality glass fibers are used in fiber-optic technology. In this technology, information is transmitted from one place to another through internal reflection of light. Fiber-optic technology is today employed in a wide range of applications in basic communication incorporating telephone lines, etc. Also, glass is used for making optical devices such as microscopes, spectacles, sophisticated telescopes, etc. There are many ways to make glass. The method depends on the type of glass required.
