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The Science of Glass

In Our Time

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The Effects of Annealing on Glass Structure

The familiar thing about glass is it breaks. If you've got a piece of glass which you're trying to cut to shape, you will usually introduce a notch and then it breaks much more easily. The point about the amorphous nature is it's quite hard for any kind of local motion. So if you want to toughen the glass, you've got to do something different to it. And one of the ways of doing that is to, again, it's back to this annealing treatment so that you change the surface of the glass. You cool the outside very fast and keep the inside warmer and then you get an external tension, internal compression. It changes the way it

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