If you desire the simplest glass of mass production for the best prices – here it is, in front of your eyes!
The float glass manufacturing technology is devilishly interesting! In order to receive the glass, silica sand, soda, calcium carbonate (potassium), ash, and various metal oxides are mixed in the required proportions. If there is a need to receive a clearer grass (yet this is another our product), less iron is added. Everything is heated up to the temperature of +1600 °С, gets melted, thoroughly mixed, and then it’s poured into a bath!
Yet this is not a simple bath or a hot tub as one might think – it’s a tin bath! The melted tin is approximately 4.5 times denser than melted glass, so that’s why glass floats on its ideally even surface thanks to this density difference and own high fluidity (this technology has given the name to the float glass). The tin bath is needed to make the glass ideally even; its down side is even because of tin, and the upper side is even because of the glass’s own surface tension.
But the glass wouldn’t float for eternity in that bath! It is being pulled out of it with special rollers, and is fed further on the conveyor, where it is cooled, cut, and transported to the storage facility or goes further on in the processing line (to turn into something different).
On such a conveyor, an endless glass sheet that comes out of the furnace (which is working all-year-round, 24/7), undergoes a number of controls, which eventually allow it to become that glass you’re using every day:
- Sheet thickness and edge thickness differential
- Uniformity of the cross-section
- The same transparency gradient around the sheet and around the edges
- Quality of edges
- Shape accuracy and no curvature
- No plaque or optical distortion
- No accidental defects.
The entire table of possible allowances exists, which tells if the glass can be used or not. As a result, you get the glass for your purposes. And there are a million options to use the float glass in the modern world – as 90% of all glass market is taken by float glass.
You can buy the colorless float glass in wholesale and retail from us. Interested? Then call!
