Polymer Interlayers for Glass Lamination-A Review

This review presents the current status of research on the development and applications of different polymeric materials used in the preparation of laminated glasses. Safety glasses used for construction are annealed, heat strengthened, toughened, and laminated. Under normal serviceability temperatures, glass behaves like a linear elastic material, which will break suddenly when tensile stresses exceed a critical value. The main safety concept is to create an overall structural plasticity for the glass. This is usually done by building laminates, individual glass panes alternated with soft transparent interlayers are composed as one coherent structural element. Different types of polymeric interlayers have been used in laminated glasses depending upon their applications for example polyvinylbutyral, polycarbonates, polyurethanes and other polymers or copolymers etc. A wide range of applications of different types of interlayers of polymer composites have been compared. The review includes physical properties of different types of glasses, fabrication procedures such as heat and pressure method and UV Curing method. In the present work it was observed that the extensive efforts are being made to replace polyvinyl butyral film by alternate films made up of polycarbonate, polyurethanes, vinyl resins etc.