Safety glass is designed to resist shattering and minimize the risk of injury. It can be toughened or laminated, with tempered glass breaking into rounded pieces and laminated glass holding pieces in place. It is stronger than conventional glass and can prevent serious injury or death.
Safety glass is a type of glass that is designed to resist shattering and break in a way that minimizes the risk of injury if the glass cannot withstand the forces exerted on it. Car windows are classically made with this type of glass to promote crash safety, and it can also be used in ordinary home windows, eyewear, laboratory glassware, and a wide variety of other products. As its name would seem to imply, it is meant to be safer than regular glass.
There are two ways safety glass can work: toughened or laminated. Tempered glass is made by treating the glass very carefully as it is heated and cooled to increase its tensile strength, making it difficult to break. If tempered glass breaks, it breaks into rounded pieces, instead of breaking into jagged pieces which could be very dangerous. People who have seen a broken side window in a car have likely seen an example of this type of glass.
Laminated safety glass is made by sandwiching a sheet of polyvinyl butyral (PVB) between two pieces of glass. Glass is stronger because of the layering and reinforcement, and when it breaks, the plastic essentially acts like a ribbon, holding the pieces in place instead of letting the sharp shards fall off. This type of glass is commonly used in car windshields, explaining the cobweb effect of broken glass that occurs when an object slams into one.
The primary purpose of this glass is to make a task safer by protecting people from sharp glass shards that can cause serious injury or even death, turning an accident into a medical emergency. Before the development of safety glass, people who passed through glass and windshields did not always live, and if they did, they were often seriously injured; severe scarring and amputations as a result of such accidents were not uncommon.
This type of glass is also designed to be stronger than conventional glass, reducing the risk of it breaking in the first place by being stronger than regular glass. Tempered glass is able to withstand rapid temperature changes along with strong impacts and laminated glass is able to withstand strong impacts as well. Laminated products have another advantage: if a person or object collides with it, the glass will not sag, keeping the object contained. In the case of a car, this prevents people from being ejected through the windshield in the event of an accident, and in things like flat glass windows, laminated glass can prevent people and objects from falling off a building.
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