Glass And Its Technical Uses

Made primarily of silica, glass is a product that has many varied uses, in day-to-day life as well as in technical fields. The primary reason why glass is used is mostly because of the non-reactive nature of the product. It can be sterilized easily and specially-made glass can withstand high temperatures, allowing it to be used for reducing compounds and formulating mixtures that are corrosive or volatile in nature. Technical glass products can be of many different kinds. To have an insight into how glass is used in technical applications, read on.

Glass can be silicate or silicate-free. Most uses of technical nature involve silicate glass. Technical uses can be categorized into laboratory glassware and optical glasses. Further differentiation can be made with glasses that are used in specific manufacturing scenarios, like protection from certain wavelengths of light, in electronics, automotive and even in fiber optic cables meant for communication purposes. As the name sounds, laboratory glassware generally encompasses glass products that are used in making test tubes, beakers, flasks, measuring devices, thermometers and the like. More intensive applications can be used in creating amplified light beams, like a laser, generating specific light wavelengths through prisms and even creating black light lamps that generate UV light. Apart from these quartz rods, quartz wool and felt, machined quartz, specialty tubing, and semiconductor ware can be classified under laboratory glassware.

Polarized glasses are used in windscreens, window panes, and reinforced screens to make devices block certain radiation. Glass can also be used in equipment that is used to generate renewable energy like solar and wind energy. In certain equipment, glass can be used in creating and blocking certain radiation for medical applications.

Optical glass is as simple as it gets. If you wear prescription glasses, chances are your glasses are made of silicate glass or fibreglass. Made of silicate, spectacles are generally heavier while fibreglass spectacles are lighter and more durable. Based on what problems your site has, these glasses can be convex, concave or a combination of different forms. These specific methods of creating glasses help refract visible light in a way that is best suited for your eyes to receive. Be it for reading or for enhancing visibility for far-off entities, without glasses, a viable and economic means of correcting sight would have been impossible. Going forward from there, be it camera lenses in your DSLR or mobile phone, telescopes or your action cameras, glass is present everywhere. Right from someone taking a casual selfie to someone discovering a new star, the versatile nature of glass plays a very important role.

When you are looking at procuring glass products of a technical nature, it is important that you understand exactly what you’re seeking. Different materials are combined to create glass with different properties. If you’re unclear about what kind of glass to use, it’s better to have a consultation with the seller and your technical team so that a constant and uninterrupted supply chain can be established. Technical products made of glass are mostly used in manufacturing on a large scale, so you need to make sure they can be supplied readily.