Rather surprisingly, glass is made of molten sand. Glass can be made by heating a common sand, which consists of silicon dioxide, until it reaches melting point and transforms into a liquid. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen at the beach! Sand only melts at extreme temperatures over 1600 ° C.
When cooled, this liquid sand does not change back to the yellow sandy stuff you had at the start – it completely transforms and gets a totally different inner structure. It doesn’t matter how much you cool sand, it will never quite set into a solid. Instead, it turns into a type of frozen liquid or what scientists call an amorphous solid. It’s like a cross between a solid and a liquid crystal with a mixture of solid and some liquid molecules. For your Glass Suppliers Bath needs, visit a site like Roman Glass, suppliers of Glass Suppliers Bath.
Glass is a material found commonly in our homes because it’s incredibly useful and versatile. In addition to being transparent, it is cheap to make, easy to shape when it is liquid, quite resistant to heat when it sets, chemically inert (so that glass bottles does not react with the things that you put in it), and can be recycled infinitely.
How glass is made?
Commercially, sand is mixed with glass for recycling, soda ash and limestone and fired up in a furnace inside a glass factory. Soda ash reduces the point at which sand melts, which helps to save energy during manufacture, but it has an unfortunate side effect: producing a kind of glass that will dissolve in the water! Therefore. lime is added to stop that happening. The resultant product is known as ‘soda lime silica glass’. This is ordinary glass we can see all around us.
