Manufacturing Float Glass Step-by-step.
Before glass gets into your car, truck, or SUV as a finished product that you look through, roll up or down, cover your engine bay, or the countless other things you can with the finished glass product, it must be ‘floated’ or made from raw materials.
Float glass is a sheet of flat glass made by floating molten glass on a bed of molten metal, typically tin. The manufacturing of glass dates back to around 3500 BC when glass is believed to have been first artificially produced in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Typical line sequence for producing glass Melting furnace Glass melting requires basically two kinds of raw materials: Sand and recycled glass called cullet. These raw materials are mixed together, charged in a furnace where there are melted at around 1500°C to form molten glass.
A continuous ribbon of molten glass is fed out of the melting furnace onto the surface of an enclosed bath of molten tin at 1100°C. The molten glass literally floats on top of the tin, and as it flows along the surface of the tin bath away from the delivery canal it forms a ribbon of uniform thickness. Thickness is controlled by the speed at which solidifying glass ribbon is drawn off from the bath.
The glass is then lifted from the tin bath onto rollers to the annealing lehr to be cooled down. At this stage the internal stresses are released ensuring perfect flatness.
