Modeling of the thermal cooling of a glass plate on a metallic frame including radiation effects

Abstract

Achieving a correct cooling in glass manufacturing is very important to obtain the desired level of stresses and to avoid breakage. Numerical simulations can be used to optimize the cooling parameters. Such simulations have to be multiphysical coupling thermics and mechanics. Moreover, since glass is a semitransparent material, radiative effects inside the glass have to be taken into account. The present paper is devoted to numerical study of the cooling of a glass square plate on a metallic frame. To this end, the commercial software Abaqus was used to model the thermomechanical behavior of glass using adapted subroutines and was combined with an in-house C++ tool developed to solve the Radiative Transfer Equation. During and at the end of the cooling, weak areas in the glass plate are revealed by the simulation. Depending on the case studied, taking accurately the radiative effects into account leads to difference of residual stresses which can reach 10 MPa in certain cases.

Keywords:

• Finite element method
• glass tempering
• radiation
• ray tracing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The classical case of infinite plate is simpler because the thermal strain profile is supposed the same in all the sections.