Tempered glass is an increasingly popular material when it comes to choosing a material for your sliding doors.
About four times stronger than ordinary glass, tempered glass can shatter into small, relatively harmless fragments when it breaks, unlike ordinary glass that breaks into jagged, sharp pieces. Consequently, tempered glass is used in those environments where safety is important.
To prepare the glass for the tempering process, the glass must first be cut to the desired size, the glass is then examined for any imperfections that could cause breakage at any stage of the tempering process. Using an abrasive, such as sandpaper, the sharp edges are removed from the glass, which is then washed.
After this first step, the glass begins a heat treatment process in which it is placed in a tempering oven. The furnace heats the glass to a temperature of over 600 degrees Celsius. (The industry standard is 620 degrees Celsius.) The glass is then subjected to a high-pressure cooling process called “tempering”. During this process, which lasts a few seconds, high-pressure air is sprayed onto the surface of the glass by a series of nozzles in various positions. The treatment is designed to cool the outer surfaces of the glass much faster than the centre. As the centre of the glass cools, it tries to expand outwards, as a result, the centre remains under tension and the outer surfaces go into compression, which gives the tempered glass its strength.
Another approach to making tempered glass is chemical tempering, in which various chemicals exchange ions on the surface of the glass in order to create compression. But since this method costs much more than using tempering furnaces, it is not widely used.
Discover the whole line of Filmar sliding door frames, suitable for tempered glass doors.
