Challenging Glass Conference Proceedings (Jun 2024)
Spontaneous Breaking of Thermally Toughened Safety Glass in Facades
Abstract
Spontaneous glass breakage of thermally toughened glass due to NiS inclusions can be largely prevented by a Heat Soak Test (HST)1. This well-established test has been incorporated into the European standard EN 14179-1:2005. However, according to literature (Yousfi 2010b), there might be a theoretical probability, that a potentially dangerous inclusion could lead to a breakage after a well-conducted HST. Glass processors may neglect to conduct the test for a variety of reasons (sometimes furnaces are not calibrated, are overloaded, a wrong temperature profile is run etc.), even advising not to perform it at all, preferring to replace the glass should failure on a building occur. In this talk, we will show that, due to recent advances in microanalysis techniques, it is now possible to state after a failure on a building whether the heat soak test was correctly conducted according the EN standard or not.