Investigation of impact characteristics of tempered vehicle and vessel glasses

Abstract

Glass is widely used at various engineering applications, especially in vehicle and vessel industry due to the reasons such as transparency, hardness at the room temperature and its strength against impact. One of the processes to be applied to glass is tempering. This process is applied to glass with the aim of providing 2-5 times more impact resistance. Additionally, if tempered glass is fractured it goes to pieces without sharp edges. These pieces are too small to injure people around them. Thus, nowadays side and rear glasses of vehicles and vessels are tempered glasses. In this study, tempered and untempered vehicle glasses were tested by using Instron Dynatup 9250 HV Impact Apparatus in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Pamukkale University, impact was applied to 145 samples with an average of 5.3 (771) times and their impact strength values were determined. In the first stage of this study, magnitudes of impact energies causing damages at tempered and untempered vehicle and vessel glasses with a thickness of 4 mm and 6 mm at +20 °C, were determined. In the second stage, impact experiments were performed at the environment temperatures of -20 °C and +40 °C apart from the room temperature, because the glasses to be produced will be used in different climate zones. In this way, a useful source of knowledge, especially for developing tempered vehicle and vessel glasses, will be constituted by determining the impact strength characteristics of these glasses. © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.