Glass and cotton are two extremely hard materials. Can you connect them? Can glass be turned into "cotton"? How is this possible?

Glass is a material widely used in modern human life, but it takes hundreds of years to decompose. Fortunately, glass can be recycled many times. Recovery of ordinary glass products can be used as a solvent for casting, conversion and disposal, recovery, raw material recycling, etc. Today we will talk about how glass is processed to produce cotton.

First of all, these recycled glass products are sent to the crusher on a conveyor belt, then they are crushed into pieces and then sent to a rotating drum, where glass and other materials are screened using different sized cells, such as plastic entrained in glass. Then use the magnet to suck out and remove all ferrous metals and the remaining glass shards will move on to the next link and enter the vulcanized stock.

Here the glass will heat up to 87 degrees Celsius. At this time, the remnants of label paper on the glass fragments will be degreased, after which the washing equipment can easily remove these labels. But at this point, you will find that glass shards of different colors are still mixed together, which requires the separation of glass shards of different colors.

With the help of automated equipment and optical sorting machines, glass fragments up to 9.5 mm in size can be accurately sorted. After sorting, the glass is sent to a hammer mill for grinding, and the ground glass is practically powdered. Put these glass powders in a furnace, the high temperature of 1648 degrees Celsius in the furnace, accompanied by up to 3.5 megawatts of electrical power, can cause the electrodes to generate electrical arcs when they work. The electric arc can quickly melt the glass powder and keep it molten. At this time, the furnace scene is like a purgatory. Molten glass can be processed into a variety of glass products, the most common of which is glass wool.

The reason this molten glass can be turned into glass wool is because the molten glass, after fiber formation, becomes as soft as cotton and can be safely touched by hands.

And it has a wide range of applications, for example, for the manufacture of composite materials, whether in the aerospace or civil industries. In addition, it also plays the role of thermal insulation in residential construction, which can better protect the outer wall, and its sound-absorbing effect is also very impressive.

In addition, it can be reused for the manufacture of glass products. It is understood that the energy consumption of recycled glass products is at least 40% lower than that of newly manufactured glass products. It can be seen that recycling is also an important step in green living.