Ever wondered how to quickly spot the source of a glass fracture?
Because there will often be a visible ‘origin’ to the breakage.
Here’s a diagram of what a point origin looks like in theory:
In this example, you can see the black arrow pointing to the origin with defined ripples moving outwards (although they don’t always display themselves in this simplistic way in real life!).
So when examining a broken glass article, we’re ultimately looking for the disturbance of the light and ripples that radiate away from the origin.
Here’s a real-life example of what we’re talking about:
You can see a small origin defect surrounded by strong radiating ripple marks which indicate that this pre-existing flaw (the red arrow) is the failure origin. But you can also see that the ripples aren’t perfectly concentric circles (as depicted in the first example).
And once you know how to identify the origin, you can continue with the investigation process to determine causation.
This content was taken from Glass Technology Services‘ new “Introduction to glass packaging breakages” short course which is due to launch soon.
To celebrate the launch of the new course, Glass Technology Services is offering a 20 percent discount to everyone who joins the early-bird waiting list.
To join the wait-list and get a 20 percent discount click here.