Stress and Volume Relaxation in Annealing Flat Glass

Abstract

Laboratory simulation of the industrial process of annealing sheet glass has yielded data on the genesis of stresses in initially stress‐free glass. The experimental results differed from expectations based on classical annealing theory in that stresses began to develop in the annealing range even when the glass was being cooled at a constant rate, i.e. even in the absence of any changes of temperature gradients within the glass. Typically, these stresses account for 40% of the total residual stress in glass annealed according to a linear schedule. The remaining 60% are the well‐known thermoelastic stresses that arise later in the annealing process from the decay of temperature gradients in the glass. The stresses observed to arise in glass as it is being cooled at a constant rate are attributed to volume relaxation effects which, in parts of the annealing range, generate stresses rapidly enough that they are not dissipated by stress relaxation. A mathematical model of annealing is proposed that takes account of both stress and structural relaxation. The model fits the experimentally observed evolution of stresses during linear cooling. It also suggests that (with the activation energies of stress and structural relaxation about the same) the actual rate, at any given temperature, of structural relaxation is about 4 times lower than that of stress relaxation.