TTI Forums

Heya, nice to see you again
Anywho~
I've got a chemistry problem on my hands here.
My glass shower sliding door just "spontaneously" exploded. I come in, and, (the room is not that hot btw) and the glass fragments are still popping from whatever did it.

I did some light research and came up with that the glass had some sort of delayed spontaneous breakage due to Nickel Sulfide inclusions in the glass.

I was wondering if you could help me out in explicating this freaky circumstance O_o

(note: no one was upstairs when it happened)

No it wasn’t spontaneous Kor. Some plate glass like your shower door is “tempered”. They slowly cool the glass at like 90% of the melting point to reduce stress within it. This process also changes the glass, so that when it breaks it turns into a vast amount of small cubes (instead of a large sheet with sharp edges). This makes the glass safer, in that it will not act like a guillotine and cut –off unprotected appendages. I find this a highly desirable quality in a shower door.

This process also toughens the glass, however a very small nick causes the whole piece to fail. So probably the frame or a handle pinched the glass (or over time rubbed the glass) and created a nick. I’ve actually done it with a file (but I can’t tell that whole story in print). Often the nick can be there for a while until the glass is struck, or dramatically changes temperature and then it fails. I recall you had some very cold weather recently, was the room heating up after being very cold?

My best guess is thermal expansion.

Good to hear from you Kor. Hope everything is going well.

Awesome! Thanks Musashi for that awesome explanation

I hope your life has been going well, take care man!