Safety

The safery of our buildings and families has always received focused attention. The only thing which has changed is the development of technology, which is apparent also in the glass industry.

However, if nowadays someone talks about safety glass, he may think not only of property protection.

We can distinguish two main categories of safety glasses:

Heat treated glasses
Laminated security/VSG glasses

Heat treated glasses

Heat treated glasses have two more types:

Tempered/ESG glasses These type of glasses get a special heat load, which results in the transformation of their crystalline structure and makes the glasses up to ten times more resistant to outer physical impacts than traditional glasses. If it does break, however, it breaks into very little pieces, thus it cannot cause serious injuries.

Heat strengthened/TVG glasses These glasses also get a special heat load similarly to tempered glass, but the duration of quenching is not as short as in the case of tempered glass. The transformation of crystal structure appears here, too, which allows the glass to be ten times more resistant to outside physical impacts than traditional glasses. However, after breaking it does not break into small pieces but the fragmentation shows a ’V’ form with pieces tightly set against each other..

Laminated security/VSG glasses

In case of VSG glasses, one or more layers of clear of matte foil are used to „glue” together more layers of glass.. Foils can have different thickness and are always located between the glasses. Glasses laminated with foils filter out a large percentage of the UV-light (even above 95%), so they protect everythinglocated behind them from fading.

We can distinguish two categories of VSG glasses accorlding to the type of foil:

VSG laminated with PVB foil. We recommend this foil for glasses where the cut edge is not exposed directly to weather conditions, it does not come into contact with water , etc. These conditions apply mostly in case of insulating glass units where the uit is installed in a frame.

VSG laminated with EVA foil. With this technology, glasses’ edges do not need protection, they can be built in freely. Statistical data shows that a significant proportion of burglaries happen through doors and windows, most of which is glass. It is interesting that we spend much more on burglary protection than on ’strengthening’ our glasses.