Laminated glass flooring

We professionally installed glass flooring can make a spectacular statement in almost any building. Light and Space can be liberated in even the dingiest of existing buildings, and with new buildings, glass flooring offers endless design possibilities. structural glass floor system is the modular easy to install, and proven in hundreds of floor applications. For most installations, two-ply laminated glass units: a top layer tempered for impact resistance and a heat-strengthened bottom layer, bonded with a clear resin inter layer. The thickness of glass used in a glass floor has a major bearing on the cost of the installation, and where cost determines the size and/or viability of a project it is always wise to look carefully at the factors determining the thickness of the glass in the flooring before drawing up the finished design

As a rule of thumb heat strengthened glass is approximately twice as “strong” as annealed or ordinary float glass, and fully toughened glass is roughly four to five times as strong. It would seem to follow that using fully toughened glass would dramatically reduce the thickness of the glass to be used in glass flooring laminates and should be used throughout. In some cases it may be that this option is the best, but in general this is not the solution adapted. Toughened and heat-strengthened glass does have an on-cost over float glass but in the case of fully toughened glass this is not the reason why it is not always used as standard in glass flooring. The problem is that the tensile stresses inside toughened glass not only give the glass added strength, but also give an increased vulnerability to short sharp shocks particularly at exposed edges. This can result in an explosive release of stress producing the fracture characteristics of small, relatively harmless fragments sometimes referred to as dice. In a laminated system, having glass shatter into these less harmful fragments has little extra safety benefit over the larger sharper fragments resulting from the breakage of float or heat strengthened glass since all the fragments are held safely in place by the lamination.