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This Isn't Cinderella's Slipper: What A Glass Blowing Quartz Apparatus Is And Does

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All things made of blown glass are nothing like the glass fairy tale slippers. In fact, some blown glass items serve incredibly useful and scientific purposes. If you see a glass blowing quartz apparatus for sale, for example, you might be in awe as to what it is for or what it does. Then you might buy it for your own experiments. Here is what this piece of glass "art" is and does.

First: The Quartz Glass

An apparatus made of blown glass and quartz utilizes quartz (the crystalline rock) and borosilicate glass in its creation. Both of these materials have a higher melt temperature, meaning that they are almost indestructible when exposed to the really high heat they will experience in a lab. The quartz and borosilicate are fused together at an atomic level during the creation of this new type of glass. It requires a very intense heat, because of course, both materials resist heat. Once fused together, the glass is ready to be shaped, blown and molded into a glass apparatus.

Second: How It Becomes an Apparatus

Apparatus is a general word, often referring to a device comprised of several components made for a specific purpose. This type of glass is blown into the shapes of tubes, cylinders, and even glass pipes that connect cylinders and tubes together in a singular piece of glass work. To get it into these shapes, forms and pipes, the glass blower spends dozens of very careful hours blowing the glass, measuring it for accuracy, cutting it, reheating it to the melting point to reshape it, and finally finishing the apparatus according the client's or customer's specifications.

Third: What the Glass Apparatus Does

Usually, a glass apparatus is meant for scientific research and laboratory work. All the tubes and connecting glass pipes contain chemicals or solutions that may be heated to a certain temperature and transferred to other glass tubes to see what the reaction would be. Pharmacological labs may use them to create new medicines, while other labs may research how those medicines affect the blood or cells, all without ever opening the cylinders, tubes or pipes. 

In any research processes where a Bunsen burner or flame heat is applied, the glass apparatus is relatively unaffected by the heat applied. Yet the substances inside will perform as expected, unless they are unknown or untested agents in the tubes. That means that most of the heat underneath the apparatus is being transferred to the substances inside almost immediately, giving the scientists or researchers more accurate data as they calculate the outcomes of the project. Contact a supplier like Carter Glassblowing Inc. to learn more.


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