How Glass is Made | What is Glass Made of?

Glass has become so commonplace today that it’s easy to see right through it without a second thought. It’s in our windows, on our screens, in our cabinets, and in many of the devices we interact with every day. Even though glass can be found everywhere, you may live your whole life not knowing much about how it’s made or what it’s composed of. Even if you think you know the basics, you’ve only skimmed the surface.   

At a high level, glass is sand that’s been melted down and chemically transformed. If you’ve ever been to the beach, you know exactly how hot sand can get while remaining in its solid form. The kind of heat necessary to transform sand into a liquid state (eventually becoming glass) is much hotter than any sunny day. To make sand melt, you need to heat it to roughly 1700°C (3090°F), which is approximately the same temperature a space shuttle reaches as it re-enters earth’s atmosphere.

The sand commonly used to make glass is comprised of small grains of quartz crystals, made up of molecules of silicon dioxide, which is also known as silica. When those molecules are heated to high enough temperatures, the sand melts and loses its crystalline structure, and as it cools it gains an entirely different structure. That structure, on a molecular level, is somewhere in between a liquid and a solid. This in-between state is known as an amorphous solid, which means it has some of the crystalline structure of a solid coupled with the molecular randomness of a liquid.

Glass products used in laboratory

In laboratory, glassware are the most used containers and tools. The glassware are stable and do not react with other chemicals and they are also not easy to be contaminated and easy to clean. The surface of glass is clear and make it convenient to observe chemicals reacting progress. The tubes and beakers are used to do experiments. The wild mouth bottles are used to store some chemicals.