Glass is very important engineering material that is used for the production of various kinds of daily and customer products and high tech. Raw materials for glass production is very abundant in earth crust. In here, we explain the glass production from sand, and the typical melting processes that are applied to glass.
Silica is one of the most important raw material is generally used to produce glass. Also recycled glass is used to produce a specific amount of glass production.
Silica is obtained from sand. There is a raw material for glass inside sand that is called ‘quartz’. To obtain this quartz, sand is washed and ‘classified’. The process which is called as ‘classifying2 includes bunch of sub-processes to removing unwanted impurities from sand and classifiying sand according to the shape and size of sand grains.
When the proper washing and purifying operations are applied to sand, sand is classified to obtain sand grains around 0.1 to 0.6 mm are separated for glass production.
This obtained special sand is mixed with other additives;
This mixture constitutes the starting form of glass as sand. This mixture is melted by using special furnaces to obtain required glass for special applications.
To work with glass such as shaping of them, a liquid form must be obtained. The starting sand to produce glass is melted around 1500-1600C degrees around 24-48 hours. There are various kinds of shaping operations are avaliable for different glass applications and products. So, required viscosity must be obtained according to the application.
Viscosity of molten glass is dependent upon its temperature. With the increasing temperature of glass, viscosity decreases. Soi required viscosity for specific glass shaping process is adjusted.
The obtained sand that is mixed with various additives to melt in furnaces is called as ‘charge’. This ‘charge’ is charged to furnaces for melting. Typically, there are four types of glass melting furnaces that are generally used in glass production industry;
As you understand above, glass is produced in the glassware production sites generally, because of the requirement of molten glass for production.
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