How do you make your home perfectly safe?
Choose safety glass to better protect yourself, your family or your workers. Below are some technical explanations so you know exactly what you need. After that, try out our GlassTool.
Safety glass contributes to a sense of peace of mind, comfort and protection. Indeed, by choosing safety glass, such as toughened glass or laminated glass, you can significantly improve safety in your home.
Safety glass is specially designed to be stronger and more durable than standard glass. It has properties that reduce the risk of injury when glass breaks and makes burglary attempts more difficult. It thus ensures the safety of people on the one hand, and the safety of buildings, equipment or property on the other.
Hardened vs Laminated
Toughened glass: is thermally treated to increase its strength. You know it from inside your car: the side windows are always tempered glass. When it breaks, it disintegrates into small, blunt pieces, reducing the risk of serious cuts. This makes it ideal for glass doors, shower covers and table tops, for example.
Laminated glass: consists of several layers of glass with a special interlayer of plastic in between. This ensures that when broken, the glass is held together by the interlayer, making it harder to break through. You know this from the car too, where the windscreen is always laminated glass. Laminated glass also offers additional benefits, such as sound insulation and protection against UV radiation.
In Belgium, laminated glass is almost exclusively chosen for buildings. This is because of the many additional advantages offered by the interlayers.
Do you know PVB?
Polyvinyl butyral (PVB) is a plastic layer pressed between two glass panels under heat and pressure. During this process, the PVB interlayer becomes optically clear and connects the two glass panels. Once sealed, the "glass sandwich" (or laminate) behaves as a single unit and looks like normal glass. The polymer interlayer of PVB is strong and flexible, preventing cracks from penetrating from one side of the laminate to the other.
Which safety glass best suits your project?
- Attention!
Which safety glass best suits your project?
- Laminated or tempered glass
- Float glass
Breaking and falling
Safety glass is essential to reduce risks when someone may fall through the glass. Structures such as railings and windows that start lower than 90 cm from the ground are required by law to be made of safety glass.
The principle is relatively simple. If someone falls through the glass, or something hits the glass causing it to break, the toughened glass will shatter into thousands of small, less dangerous pieces. Either laminated glass will stick together, preventing them from falling down like sharp knives. Both toughened glass and laminated glass ensure that in the event of a breakage, the risk of injury from glass fragments is minimised, which is an important consideration for the safety of building occupants and users.
Break-in safe
Laminated glass offers an advantage that tempered glass does not: it makes burglary more difficult. The number of layers of film in safety glass affects the delay time it takes a burglar to get through the glass. This delay time is sometimes expressed as the number of hours it takes a burglar to break through the glass.
With each additional layer of film, the resistance to burglary is increased and it becomes more difficult and time-consuming for a burglar to break through the glass. Laminating multiple layers of film between glass panels strengthens the structure of the glass and increases its overall strength.
The exact time it takes a burglar to get through the glass can vary and depends on several factors. The thickness and composition of the glass, the burglary methods used and the tools used all play an influence. Of course, no glass is 100% burglar-proof, but using multiple layers of film can significantly increase the delay time and act as a deterrent to burglars.
It is advisable to seek advice from a glass professional to select the most suitable safety glass based on your specific security needs and circumstances. In doing so, don't go too crazy: Sprimoglass can make your glass bulletproof, but fortunately this is rarely a real need.
So safety glass also works from the inside out.
As bank directors, the safety of our employees and customers is our top priority. That is why we chose high-quality bulletproof glass. Of course, I hope we will never be able to test the quality, but Sprimoglass' expertise guarantees the highest security standards. Thank you for the peace of mind you have given us."
Alexander Van der Meer
Bank director
Together, we looked at all the details and arrived at a specific safety glass for our site.
The cooperation between our research centre and Sprimoglass was very productive. The detailed research and close cooperation led to the implementation of specific security glazing for burglary and impact protection at our company site. The glazing is of high quality and meets all security requirements. Sprimoglass was professional and efficient in their approach, ensuring the smooth implementation of this secure project.
Didier D'Haene
CEO
Projects
Residence de Waele- Gijzegem
Enjoy the perfect combination of luxury and nature with our beautiful glazing for private homes.
Red Star Line Museum- Antwerp
We provided expertise in glass design for the unique Red Star Line Museum