How To Choose Between Laminated vs. Tempered Glass

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This intact breakage illustrates how tempered glass forms tiny, countless pieces. However, most tempered glass shatters to the ground upon impact.

Note that even though there was a powerful impact, this tempered glass has remained structurally intact.

Tempered vs. Laminated: How To Choose The Right One For Your Job

So for strength and breakage-resistance, temper glasses often is the first consideration. For flexibility, UV-resistance, security and sound considerations, laminated glass is often the product of choice. Both are considered safety glazing materials and can be obtained in a variety of thicknesses and colors or tints. Both are easy to clean and maintain when installed properly.

Keep in mind that tempered glass cannot be cut. Once glass has undergone the tempering process, piercing the surface will cause the glass to explode. If using tempered glass for a project, be sure that all sizing is completed before the glass is tempered. In contrast, laminated glass can typically be cut and sized at any time without issue, which could be a benefit for some projects.

Typically, laminated glass products are a slightly higher price than tempered products of the same type and thickness. The optical clarity for both laminated and tempered glass are excellent in either product will provide many years of satisfactory service in your door or window.

Transcription of Breaking Tempered Glass Video

Daniel: So we&#;re here to break some more glass! What do we have today?

Dustin: So this is an insulated unit. This is essentially what most windows are made up of. It&#;s two pieces of glass with a spacer in between that creates dead air space, and that&#;s what insulates it.

Daniel: So this basically what you would find in a residential home for people&#;s windows?

Dustin: Absolutely. Also in a commercial setting; very similiar process. So this pieces of glass is actually a safety glass. It&#;s tempered. Both sides are actually tempered. So it takes a really good shot. It&#;s rigid. But it&#;s point sensitive, which is why we&#;ve given you this fun tool to break it with.
So when it breaks- and it doesn&#;t break like a regular piece of plate glass in big pieces- it breaks into small pieces so if it were to fall on you, obviously it doesn&#;t hurt you as bad. So why don&#;t you show us what happens when you break tempered glass.

So what&#;s really cool about tempered, for me, is that you can typically tell where it breaks from. So it actually spiderwebs from the location. Now, this will continue to crack. It will continue to break.

Daniel: Yeah, we can actually hear it right now.

Dustin: You can hear it, right. And then eventually it will fall out. So tempered glass breaks into these small pieces. Will these cut you? For sure. This can definitely still cut you. It&#;s still glass. But the reality of it is, this doesn&#;t cut you as bad, or can cut you as bad, as what the larger pieces do.

So when tempered glass breaks, it breaks into small pieces. We noticed earlier when you hit it, that you kind of bounced off a time or two, right? You didn&#;t necessarily put much swing into it. Well, tempered is point sensitive because there&#;s energy trapped inside, but it&#;s also edge sensitive. So what I want to let you do, is I want you to hit the edge of it. But instead of using a point, I&#;m going to let you wrench it around and see what you can make happen.

Daniel: Alright, let&#;s see what happens.

Dustin: Give her a shot!

Daniel: So you can see it&#;s just kind of like a little chip right there.

Dustin: For sure. Now here&#;s an interesting piece of this- a lot of times you find or hear of glass breaking spontaneously, right? Spontaneous glass breakage. Something like this can actually cause this piece of glass to break in six months, or in a year. And if that got chipped at some point during the process of making it, and it still got installed, that can explain some crazy day where this piece of glass blows up.

Daniel: And that&#;s actually really common in the automotive world with sunroofs especially. Those are a lot of times made of tempered glass. People say that they&#;ll just be driving down the road and all of a sudden the sunroof explodes.

Dustin: Yea, it&#;s just one of those things that&#;s really hard to explain and if you try to put a story behind it, there&#;s really no telling. But that right there can cause an issue for sure down the road.

Daniel: Alright, so let&#;s take another stab at it&#;It&#;s tougher than it looks!

Dustin: Alright, there you go. So with the right amount of force and hitting it at the right angle definitely causes the issue of having it come apart. The other beauty of this is, we didn&#;t have the back side to hold it in, so you saw that one actually came apart. Similiar story with the sunroof exploding. So there you have it man, that&#;s kind of how the whole tempering process works.

Transcription of Breaking Laminated Glass Video

Daniel: This is laminated glass.

Dustin: This is laminated. So laminated is a type of safety glass. There&#;s essentially three safety glasses. Tempered, laminated, and then an acrylic or plexiglass, which is kind of a plastic base.
So what we have here is two pieces of glass that are laminated together with a film- an adhesive film. And essentially this is annealed, or plate glass, on both sides.

Want more information on laminated glass and tempered glass? Feel free to contact us.

Daniel: And so where would you find this?

Dustin: So interesting fact: Almost everybody looks through this nearly every day because this is what your windshield is made out of. But also we use this in a lot of areas for storefront. If you see a gas station that has been broken into, sometimes this is what we put in to deter thieves from getting in. It&#;s a lot harder to get into.
We also use it in bullet-resistant glass. They laminate multiple pieces together. You&#;ll find it sometimes in residential. And in those cases it&#;s typically in a hurricane (prone) area where you have to have some blast type of glass.

Daniel: Alright well let&#;s take a shot at trying to break this and kind of demonstrate what that laminated interlayer does for the glass to keep it together.

Dustin: For sure!

Daniel: Wow!

Dustin: So that&#;s a great first shot. You can see where it broke from. Just like most glass, you can always see where it spiderwebs from and where it goes. That actually looks a lot like what your windshield looks like when a big rock hits it, right? Maybe not quite that extreme. But you can also tell that it&#;s still intact. This piece of glass&#; integrity is there.

Daniel: It&#;s solid.

Dustin: Correct. I mean, it&#;s not going anywhere. It also is really not likely to cut you. All of these runs that you see&#;

Daniel: It&#;s pretty much totally smooth.

Dustin: It&#;s smooth! It&#;s held together by the interlayer. So why don&#;t you give it a couple more hits in the same spot so we can show just what it takes to literally get through this thing.

So what you can see is the interlayer. You can see the plastic interior of the laminate piece. It actually holds together really really well. So what you&#;ve done is broken the glass away but the interlayer is still there.

Daniel: Yea, so that&#;ll deter theft, like you said, in a storefront. If you&#;re in your automobile and this is your windshield then it&#;s going to keep your windshield together while you&#;re going down the road, or god forbid, if you hit the windshield.

Dustin: So a cool piece of this is, all of this damage that you&#;ve done and this thing is still together. It hasn&#;t come apart. It won&#;t hurt you essentially. It could. But for the most part, this is what makes this a safety glass.

Daniel: Yea, and that&#;s extremely important for residents like in Florida where they have a lot of hurricanes; there&#;s a lot of wind damage; storm damage. So if this was a window on your home, I think you&#;d be pretty safe during a hurricane.

Dustin: For sure. You hear about windows blowing out all the time. This would be one of those windows that doesn&#;t do it.

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There is a large difference between these two types of glass.  In the end, the main difference all boils down to how the glass breaks.  Tempered glass breaks into smaller pieces, and laminated glass will crack but remain together due to the plastic layer that is baked between the two pieces of glass.

Tempered glass

Tempered glass is a finalized product and most commonly used for glass shower doors.  Once the glass has been tempered, it can no longer be altered.  Depending on the intended use of the final product, first the glass would be cut, then polished.  Lastly, any holes or notches would be drilled into the glass. After all of the fabrication was complete, the glass would be run through a tempering oven and the glass baked at anywhere between 800 and degrees, depending on its thickness.

There are a couple reasons to temper glass.  One is to strengthen the glass, after being tempered the glass becomes very strong on its face, making it much harder to break,  The other reason is safety.  When or if the glass does break, instead of breaking into large shards of glass that you would normally see, it breaks into many smaller pieces.  The smaller pieces are still very sharp.  However instead of someone getting cut badly from a large piece of glass, what usually happens is they will end up with a few smaller cuts.

Laminated glass

Laminated glass is actually two pieces of glass separated by a sheet of plastic interlayer.  1/4&#; thick laminated glass is made up of two pieces of 1/8&#; glass with a thin layer of plastic between them.  3/8&#; laminated glass is made up of two pieces of 3/16&#; glass with a thin layer of plastic between them.

Laminated glass can be cut and fabricated.  Both pieces of glass need to be cut separately, and then the plastic needs to be cut.  It&#;s a time consuming process and lots of practice is required to be able to do it well.

When is safety glass used?

The safety portion of tempered glass is very important because there are certain parts of modern building codes that require glass to be either tempered or laminated.  For instance, any glass that is installed into a door needs to be either tempered or laminated by code.

All of the glass in your car is safety glass.  The windshield is laminated glass so when a rock or pebble is kicked up from the road, it may break the windshield glass, but it will just crack and remain in tact.  The doors and back glass of the vehicle are normally tempered glass, however some manufacturers have switched to using laminated.

Any glass installed into any door, or next to a door will be a type of safety glass.  Some businesses such as convenience stores prefer to use laminated glass in their storefront doors because it makes it more difficult for someone to break in.

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