Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The Making of Glass

Glass is oftenly found everywhere in houses, offices, or industries. But do we know, that the process of making glass isn't as simple as it looks like?

The main ingredients of glass are sand, soda, and limestone. There are also additional ingredients such as boron, barium, thorium oxide, and iron, which every of them are used on certain purposes, e.g increases the refractive index and change the thermal properties.

The way of making glass is as follows :

First, three main ingredients, sand, soda, and limestone are mixed and placed on the furnace (special heater plate) and then we could set the temperature as needed.

Second, the mixture of sand, soda, and limestone placed on the furnace is flowed separately for further processing into 2 kinds : plate glass and bottle glass.

Third, for the plate glass, the mixture is placed on a box that has a hole on the bottom in order to flow the mixture slowly. This flow is then rolled by special rollers upside down so that it generates certain plate shapes for certain purposes of the glass.

Fourth, for the bottle glass, the mixture is flowed, along with the air, to the removable bottle-shaped mould. This makes the mixture fills the side, so that when it becomes hard, the mould could be removed and the bottle-glass is made.

After the completion, those plate and bottle glasses are ready to use, to be sold, or for collecting purpose.

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