Glass cloth

Glass cloth is a textile material woven from glass fiber yarn.

Home and garden

Glass cloth was originally developed to be used in greenhouse paneling, allowing sunlight's ultraviolet rays to be filtered out, while still allowing visible light through to plants.

Glass cloth is also a term for a type of tea towel suited for polishing glass. The cloth is usually woven with the plain weave, and may be patterned in various ways, though checked cloths are the most common. The original cloth was made from linen, but a large quantity is made with cotton warp and tow weft, and in some cases they are composed entirely of cotton. Short fibres of the cheaper kind are easily detached from the cloth.^[1]

In the Southern Plains during the Dust Bowl, states' health officials recommended attaching translucent glass cloth to the inside frames of windows to help in keeping the dust out of buildings, although people also used paperboard, canvas or blankets. Eyewitness accounts indicate they were not completely successful.^[2]

Use in technology

Due to properties of glass such as heat resistance and an inability to ignite, glass has been used to create fire barriers in hazardous environments such as inside of racecars. Its poor flexibility, and its being a source of skin irritation, made the fibers inadequate for apparel uses.

Its bi-directional strength make glass cloth useful for some fiberglass reinforced plastics.^[3] For example, the Rutan VariEze homebuilt aircraft uses a moldless glass cloth - epoxy composite structure and skin. Glass cloth is commonly used as the reinforcing lattice for pre-pregs.^[4]

References

^ One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Glass cloth". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 112.
^ Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 1930s... by Donald Worster. Oxford University Press.
^ Shindo, Y (2001). "Double Cantilever Beam Measurement and Finite Element Analysis of Cryogenic Mode I Interlaminar Fracture Toughness of Glass-Cloth/Epoxy Laminates". Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology. 123 (2): 191–197. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.1064.8944. doi:10.1115/1.1345527.
^ Rusnákov, S (2018). Overview of production of pre-preg, prototype and testing. XXIII International Conference on Manufacturing (Manufacturing 2018). Vol. 448. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. doi:10.1088/1757-899X/448/1/012069.