Applications for curved glass in buildings

Abstract

In the last years an increase of the number of building projects with built-in curved glass can be observed. The applications can principally be curved monolithic glass, laminated safety glass or insulated glass. This fact makes it absolute of interest to make more investigations in this field. The investigations can be focused on e.g. the process of the bending of the glass to bring it into a certain shape, or the very difficult topic of pre-stressing it. The state of the art of the production process of such glass shows some different ways to produce curved glass. The most used way is to bend the glass at a high temperature of more than 550° Celsius. Another kind of curved glass can be achieved in combination with the laminating process. With the cooling down at the end of the laminating process the interlayer becomes stiff enough to hold the shape by activated shear forces between the glass layers. Another possibility is to produce flat glass and bend it while mounting the glass. The question how to pre-stress curved glass is on the very first beginning of investigations. All these different processes are on the first view very easy but very difficult in the detail.