There is no standard pool and standard landscape and sometimes you'll find areas that normal glass panels just won't work in. That is why we are able to custom make glass panels to suit all situations.
All Aqua Vista Glass Products are Grade A Toughened Safety Glass
Below outlines how glass is made and the toughening process to produce Safety Glass.
Float Glass
The float glass process is the most common method of flat glass production in the world. This process involves pouring recycled glass, silica sand, limestone and soda ash from a furnace onto a large bed of molten tin. This mixture slowly solidifies over the molten tin as it enters the annealing oven where it travels along rollers under a controlled cooling process. From this point the glass emerges in one continuous long ribbon where it is then cut and further processed to customer specification. As the name suggests, clear float glass is colourless and transparent when viewed face on. When viewed on edge, it displays a slight green tinge. Clear float glass offers a very high level of natural daylight or visible light transmittance to pass through it.
Float Glass Manufacture
The twentieth century saw improvements in the method of glass manufacture through better optical quality and larger panels. Nevertheless, these improvements still produced glass with slightly uneven or distorted surfaces. In order to improve the optical qualities, both surfaces were sometimes required to be ground and polished to achieve greater flatness and no distortion. In 1952, Pilkington Glass invented the ‘Float process’ which revolutionised glass manufacture. The process ensured high optical quality, flatness and no distortion.The float process begins with the mixing of raw materials through the batch house:
The raw materials are then fed into a melting furnace where they are heated to around 1700ºC. The molten glass mixture then flows into a bath filled with molten or liquid tin. The molten glass floats on top of the tin in the float bath. The temperature now decreases to around 1100ºC and the hardening glass floats out of the tin bath into the annealing chamber until the temperature falls to around 700ºC. From the annealing chamber the glass is then cut into the required sheet sizes.
Due to the flat surface of the liquid tin, the float process creates exceptionally flat glass sheets, absolutely free from distortion.The float line process is a 24 hour a day non-stop operation. A float line can be operated continuously for periods of around 10 years without repair or refit. The discovery of glassware in ancient Mesopotamia has been dated to approximately 7000 years old. The use of glass as a building material dates back to ancient Rome, about 30BC to 345AD. The early methods of manufacture was through blowing the glass into shape. This technique produced low quality small sized sheets mainly for use in windows. This method was used well into the seventeenth century.
Producing toughened and heat strengthened glass begins with the feeding by conveyor of cut-to-size annealed sheets of glass (with minimum arrised edges) into a furnace. The glass oscillates back and forth on ceramic rollers to an approximate temperature of 620ºC. Under computer control, the glass moves into the quench where it is rapidly cooled by high pressure cool air. This ‘snap’ cooling or quenching induces compressive stresses to the glass surface, while the centre remains in tension. Although the physical characteristics remain unchanged, the additional stresses created within the glass increases its strength by 4–5 times (for toughened glass) compared to that of annealed glass of equal thickness. Toughened safety glass produced for Aqua Vista Glass is manufactured to the requirements of AS/NZS2208 Safety glazing materials in buildings
Toughened and Heat Treated Glass
Producing toughened and heat strengthened glass begins with the feeding by conveyor of cut-to-size annealed sheets of glass (with minimum arrised edges) into a furnace. The glass oscillates back and forth on ceramic rollers to an approximate temperature of 620ºC. Under computer control, the glass moves into the quench where it is rapidly cooled by high pressure cool air. This ‘snap’ cooling or quenching induces compressive stresses to the glass surface, while the centre remains in tension. Although the physical characteristics remain unchanged, the additional stresses created within the glass increases its strength by 4–5 times (for toughened glass) compared to that of annealed glass of equal thickness. Toughened safety glass produced for Aqua Vista Glass is manufactured to the requirements of AS/NZS2208 Safety glazing materials in buildings
What is Heat Treated Glass
In this section heat treated will refer to heat strengthened and heat soaked glass.
Toughened Glass Features and Applications
Safety – Toughened safety glass is manufactured to AS/NZS2208 and 2080 and is a Grade A safety glass as per AS1288;
Spontaneous Breakage
On rare occasions, toughened glass can break for what seems to be no apparent reason. A variety of contaminants in the raw stock can lead to problems either during or subsequent to the toughening process. Investigation into some instances of spontaneous breakage has identified an impurity in the glass called nickel sulphide as the cause. Most often however,
breakage is usually due to surface damage or excessive loading on toughened glass.
Nickel Sulphide NiS
Microscopic nickel sulphide stones are a rare, undetectable contaminant in raw glass stock. The heating and rapid surface cooling processes of glass toughening is believed to change NiS stones from a stable to unstable state. Heat soaking is a method used to lower the chances of spontaneous breakage.
Heat Soaking
Heat soaking involves heating toughened glass in a special oven at temperatures close to 280ºC to 290ºC for several hours to induce breakages that may be caused by inclusions or contaminants in the glass. However heat soaking does not guarantee detection of all inclusions or contaminants that may lead to spontaneous breakages.
Heat Strengthening
Though not suitable for Grade A safety glass applications, the probability of nickel sulphide inclusions inducing spontaneous breakage is practically nonexistent with heat strengthened glass.
Toughened Identification Stamp
Permanent stamps are located in the corner to identify the Australia Standards compliance license number
