A mathematical model for the formation of thick edges in a drawn glass sheet

What is it about?

Very thin glass sheets can be manufactured using the redraw process, in which a prefabricated glass sheet is reheated and stretched. Typically, thin glass sheets manufactured this way are thicker at the edge than in the middle. In this paper, we develop a model that explains this phenomenon, and determines how the properties of the redrawn sheet depend on the process parameters. We treat the glass as a thin viscous sheet, where the viscosity varies with temperature, and the fact that the sheet is thin is exploited to simplify the model.

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