The ongoing climate crisis, high energy prices and social change regarding the sustainable use of our resources are currently shaping the glass industry. Current developments, such as the conversion from gas-powered to electrically-powered float glass tanks, the collection of old flat glass cullet and the direct reuse of already "old" flat glass, not only show the industry's interest in these issues, but also their active implementation.
Future and opportunities in flat glass
For the competitiveness of the glass industry as well as the resource-saving handling of the raw material glass, these future aspects are decisive for me: thinner, stronger and more multifunctionality.
See also: Vacuum insulating glass for historical renovations and modernisations
Thinner: By developing new and application-oriented design approaches, the potential of glass can be better and better exploited, which ultimately leads to thinner glass structures with the same performance. This includes, for example, the simulation of thermal effects on complex insulating glass structures or the design of vacuum insulating glass, in combination with the use of new laminated glass structures.
Stronger: For the design of glass panes - especially thin glass panes - the strength is decisive. This can be increased, for example, by thermal or chemical tempering. However, edge strength can also be significantly improved without the energy-intensive processes by cutting and edge processing with optimised machine settings.
Also interesting: Saint-Gobain Glass and Ragn-Sells are now recycling partners
Multifunctionality: In addition to transparency and thermal insulation, glasses will have to meet other requirements in the future, such as generating energy without reducing transparency and behaving adaptively to changing environmental conditions and user behaviour.
About the Glass Competence Centre
The team of the Glass Competence Centre at TU Darmstadt is working on these three aspects of thinner, stronger and more multifunctional glass, so that glass can also be used sensibly and in a resource-saving way in the future.
