Tag: insulating glass

Three Ways to Maintain Safety Throughout the Busy Season

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The dog days of summer are upon us. It’s the midst of the busy season and working quickly is a necessity. Fabricators must pull it off without sacrificing our commitment to quality and maintaining safe working conditions.

But this time of year comes with its challenges. Moving more insulating glass (IG) down the line to meet demand can lead to the potential cutting of corners. Then there’s the heat, which may lead to increased fatigue among your workforce, decreased focus and greater injury risk.

With these conditions in mind, fabricators should make a concerted effort to keep conditions manageable and safe. What can be done? Here are a few ways plants can reduce risk and prioritize safety this busy season.

Think small. The temperature may be the most direct risk associated with summer on the shop floor. Fatigue and dehydration are risks for your workers, but fatigued employees can risk everyone’s safety if a mistake is made.

Luckily, there are some simple ways to combat the heat. Consider pumping chilled air onto your floor space if possible or create designated “cool zones” where workers can escape the heat periodically. And while this may sound like a no-brainer, be sure always to make cold drinking water available to your workforce. You can even go the extra mile and provide popsicles.

Take advantage of your equipment. The rise of semi-automated equipment and fully automatic high-speed insulating glass lines in commercial glass manufacturing has brought many benefits to shop floors everywhere. One of the most important is the impact they can have on safety in the manufacturing plant.

But first, there’s the matter of ensuring all teams are adequately trained to use such equipment safely and effectively. Automation solutions are large pieces of machinery moving near and around your workforce—equipping operators with the proper knowledge to operate these systems effectively, efficiently and safely is of the utmost importance. Workers should also be well-versed in proper maintenance schedules and procedures to keep the equipment in good working order at all times.

The safety benefits will manifest from there. Fewer touchpoints on an IG line regarding spacer application, for instance, means fewer chances for workers to contact the sharp edges of glass. Think about your glass-cutting processes, breakout tables, edge deletion and more—each is an area that has the potential for automation.

Rethink transport and handling. Commercial glass is big—and as size increases, traditional manual methods for spacer application and frame assembly can become more demanding and complicated, requiring several workers to complete these tasks. Not to mention an increased risk of accident or injury dealing with oversized units.

But the right equipment can help us move and transport units of all sizes more effectively and efficiently around the plant floor. Robotic lifts can provide great assistance and are also immune to the heat of summer—meaning you can allocate your employees to help keep track of orders as they move throughout the plant floor. Using machine-assisted equipment for loading and offloading units onto and from a line helps reduce fatigue and the need for brute force at another critical touchpoint.

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Keeping your manufacturing floor safe is critical to the success of any organization. As we continue to work through this summer, let’s make sure we’re keeping that commitment and that we’re deploying the right strategies to make it happen.

Joe Erb is the national account manager for Quanex.

Three Tips to Ensure High-Quality Commercial Insulating Glass

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October is national manufacturing month — an opportunity for manufacturers everywhere to celebrate the important things we make, do and deliver for applications around the world. It’s also an occasion to help shepherd new young professionals into the field, where there are plenty of rewarding, lucrative careers to be made.

When I think about manufacturing in the commercial fenestration industry, I tend to focus on the craft of it. Making high-performance insulating glass (IG) that must stand up to the rigorous demands of forward-thinking architecture is no easy task. It requires precise attention to every part of the process, and everyone involved in production on your shop floor should be familiar with the proper best practices. Their ability to understand both how and why certain elements of production can lead to unit failure is important.

With all of this in mind, I thought it was worth casting some attention to what our teams at Quanex frequently see as pain points in the fabrication process for commercial IG of all edge seal construction types. And while all parts of IG manufacturing are important, uncompromising quality on the following three points can best help you prevent unit failure:

Ensure a Good Primary Seal
A good primary seal, which acts as your unit’s main moisture/gas barrier, starts with a good sealant profile. Make sure your primary sealant is properly placed and not over- or underfilled. Avoid skips or voids in the primary sealant.

After you have a good seal profile, it’s essential to close the start/stop points or joints. If these are not joined/sealed properly, you’re creating a potential path for moisture/gas — and potential for desiccant to get into the air space. After you’ve pressed the unit, verify that the primary sealant is fully pressed out and wetted to the glass and spacer. Fully wetted PIB should be a solid, flat black. Checking these criteria on the first few units out of your press should indicate whether you need to make any adjustments to your processes.

Properly Applying Your Secondary Seal
Your secondary seal ensures the structural integrity of the unit, helping it to withstand the inherent temperature fluctuations and dynamic pressure changes of demanding commercial applications. First, the spacer should be consistently inset to allow for a proper secondary sealant depth. Work with your sealant supplier to identify proper sealant depth recommendations to meet structural performance standards. And remember that thicker glass, larger units or units intended for highly demanding applications may require more sealant depth.

Next, be sure that your inset is properly filled — structural effectiveness is at stake. Avoid slumping or dishing in the center. Sealants can sometimes flow up the sides of the glass, making the inset appear fully filled when the center might in fact be too shallow. Once the proper depth is achieved, check for and close any joints or gaps, and fix any bulges that extend past the glass edges.

Finally, good racking can help protect your units while the sealant cures. Your racks should be clean and free of dust, debris and old sealant material that can become embedded in a freshly applied secondary sealant, compromising performance. Support strips should be firm and wide to fully support the weight of your unit without compressing. If your unit sinks into the support, the strip can displace the secondary sealant. Poor racking can cause an otherwise good unit to fail earlier than expected.

Protect the Desiccant
Desiccant prevents moisture accumulation within the unit’s interior. Even a perfectly sealed IG unit can begin to show condensation in the air space shortly after it’s been assembled if the desiccant has been compromised.

Whether your desiccant is a separate, powdered component or is incorporated into the spacer material, its job is to adsorb moisture from its surrounding environment. Molecular sieve is the most common desiccant used in IG, which has a very strong affinity for moisture even at very low humidity. A desiccant-filled spacer left out and exposed long enough, to even a modest 20% relative humidity, can potentially adsorb up to 80% of its total moisture capacity before it even makes it into your IG unit.

What to do? Protect the desiccant from exposure to fresh air as much as possible at all stages of production. Storing it properly when not in use limits its potential to waste desiccating capacity before it’s applied, helping it to deliver proper performance once sealed into the unit.

These are some things to keep in mind throughout your manufacturing processes. Keeping a keen focus on the craft of IG fabrication can help ensure high-quality units that will last. Happy manufacturing month!

Joe Erb is national account manager for Quanex.

Being Thankful for Progress

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We’re approaching the end of November, and that means Thanksgiving and the holiday season is right around the corner. I hope that after the challenges our industry has been through this year, you’ll be able to find at least a bit of time to rest and reflect over the next month or so.

With all of this in mind, I got to thinking about what we—the fenestration industry—can or should be thankful for this year. On first thought, it might seem a bit difficult to identify those things as we continue to navigate the ongoing supply chain crunch, labor issues, and additional challenges that arrived with the pandemic and don’t seem to have subsided.

But I was struck by a couple of recent news items in this magazine. A new report from Key Media & Research suggests that commercial glass-related construction is approaching a full rebound. Elsewhere, a panel of commercial construction industry experts recently noted that construction pipelines are full and expect that the market is headed toward a period of sustained growth. You’ve probably been seeing and hearing similar chatter in the past few months.

This is all good news we can be thankful for, and it’s also worth thinking about a little more deeply. It’s evidence not just of the resiliency of our industry, but of commercial glass and glazing’s vital role in the modern built environment. The benefits are real, and they’re in high demand in new construction. Outstanding efficiency and occupancy comfort. Daylighting and views. Long-term performance.

We’ve helped sustain the demand for these benefits by working with building code communities to demonstrate glass’s ability to meet desirable performance targets in large-format glazing and curtainwall applications. We’ve also done it by utilizing proven technologies such as warm-edge spacer systems, low-E coatings, new kinds of framing, and other solutions. Glass today is an essential part of modern facades—and it’s because of the tremendous effort and innovation our industry has delivered over the past few decades. I’m thankful for the progress we’ve made toward the realization of more efficient, modern commercial construction.

It’s worth thinking about this collective hard work and collaboration as we begin to look toward next year and the future beyond. And while for many in the industry it’s been difficult to forecast too far beyond the day-to-day, it’s important that commercial glass professionals don’t let today’s challenges cause us to rest on our laurels. Make no mistake—it’s rough in the world of commercial glass fabrication and installation right now. But demand for what we can bring to modern buildings is higher than it’s ever been, and it will take our continued efforts and innovation to keep driving that demand higher.

Toward the end of a year filled with challenges, I hope you can find some things to be thankful for in the commercial fenestration space. And I’d love to hear what they are—let me know at Joe.Erb@Quanex.com.