THE WAY TO COOL

Having passed the most sultry part of its path in the furnace, the light glass river gets into a more “cool climate”. In this "climate" is also terribly hot. The temperature is a thousand degrees here. But it no longer comes from the glass furnace: the glass river itself gives off the heat. Her movement slows down. It becomes viscous and now looks like shiny thickened honey.

At the Glass Factory

 Red, heavy, it crawls out of the furnace in the form of a wide ribbon. The channel along which it moves is slightly oblique, and the river accelerates its run. But at the very beginning of its new path, there is an obstacle in the form of a rolling brake. It has two large continuously rotating shafts. Between them is a small gap. A hot mass squeezes through it and, unnoticed by the observer's eyes, turns into a transparent glass ribbon, and runs and runs forward.

Let's go after it. The conveyor carries it from the rolling brake into a long electric furnace. Here the glass ribbon passes through several “climates” again. At the entrance to the furnace, it was met by the heat of six hundred and eighty degrees. Then it gets a little cooler: the temperature falls to six hundred - five hundred and fifty degrees.

At the Glass Factory

Even further the path of the glass tape lies in the “colder” zones of the furnace, where the temperature is “only” four hundred and twenty degrees of heat. And finally, when she already leaves the furnace, her temperature falls to sixty degrees.

Why did we need to pass glass through all these temperature zones? Wouldn't it be easier to cool it right away? It’s simpler, but such glass will crack immediately. This will happen because the upper layers cool faster than the inner ones. To prevent this, all glass products are cooled not in the air, but in special kilns.