Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles In the middle of bluegrass and bourbon country in Harrodsburg, Kentucky is Corning's oldest glass factory. This facility was built for ophthalmic glass pressing in the early 1950s. And then in the 1980s, we transitioned into the fusion forming process to make LCD glass. That grew into an enormous business for us within Corning. But about six months before the first iPhone was released in 2007, Steve Jobs made a call to the CEO of Corning and asked the company to create glass that could withstand scratches and breakage for a new Apple product. Before that phones were typically covered in plastic. Corning quickly developed Gorilla Glass and this factory went through a complete transformation. We leverage the fusion forming technology to make Gorilla Glass and to make the first composition of Gorilla Glass here in Harrodsburg. Since 2007, I could say that the Harrodsburg plant has undergone a number of innovations to support all of the new Gorilla Glasses as they transition to stronger and more scratch resistant and more durable glass. The same company that developed the glass for the Edison bulb in 1879 is now making the glass that covers 6 billion smartphones, tablets, screens and wearables worldwide. We got a rare look inside Corning's flagship Gorilla Glass factory to find out how it's made. Robots and massive machines are continuously making glass 24/7 here. It starts with a mix materials that are sourced from all over the world. Here we are in the mix house. This is really where the heart and the start of the Gorilla Glass composition begins. Some people may think the glass is just sand but it really isn't. There's a lot of complex science that goes into Gorilla Glass specifically. It is extremely important that we have a strong and robust recipe. So as you think about how you make your cake at home similar to that we have fine tuned and evolved the process for making glass over decades. What you can see in the facility are screw feeders and feeding systems that will take that material and transition it into a large bowl where it will be mixed so that we ensure that the mixture is homogeneous and can create the best glass possible. One bag, as you see here, once it's filled will actually turn into thousands of sheets of Gorilla Glass. The raw material then travels up seven stories to the top of the factory. Where it enters a giant oven turned up to more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Corning did not allow us to film the oven for fear that competitors would figure out its secret sauce and take a chunk of its $11.4 billion in sales in 2018. But it was an impressive giant machine that melts the raw material to hot molten glass over the course of days. The lava-like glass then flows down several stories while it cools and strengthens in a process called fusion forming. So to describe our fusion forming process, if you imagine a trough and the glass comes into the top of that trough and then flows over the edges of the trough down to the point where it fuses together. It's really fusing together in air and nothing touches that pristine surface so both sides of the glass are pristine as it transitions down multiple stories to the bottom of our process where it's then scored and separated into discrete sheets. Fusion forming process is capable of making thicknesses of glass over two millimeters down to 100 microns or dot one millimeter, which is just larger than the size of a strand of hair. The glass comes out of the fusion process in sheets that are cut as big as 9 feet by 10 feet. Only robots touch the glass throughout the process. And sometimes the robots make mistakes. So as the glass transitions to this final step before it gets shipped and packed realize that the glass has never been touched by human hands. When it gets to this final step, we laminate the glass to protect it both for shipping and to allow our customers to handle the glass as they pull the sheets out of the crates. The sheets are then transitioned into crates where they're further packed and ensured that they're in pristine condition as they ship. Early on in fusion glass development there were some manual steps but we found that those manual steps could impose safety concerns. And so the robots were really developed to enhance our manufacturing process and to eliminate the safety involved in handling glass. We can create glass from extremely thin to 100 microns to two millimeters thick. Depending on the thickness of glass, it really determines how many sheets of glass we pack in a crate. But crates in general can have hundreds of sheets within one crate. We really have limited breakage. Once it's loaded into crates the glass is then shipped off for finishing, which is done all over the world depending on the preference of the device manufacturer. Gorilla Glass is one of the toughest glasses out there. And what makes it tough is not only what you see here because it actually hasn't obtained all of its strength at this point. After it's packed and shipped it goes through a chemical strengthening process called an ion exchange process. The composition that we've set up allows us to then take a finished sheet of glass put it into a bath of hot salt and in that bath of hot salt sodium ions are exchanged for a larger potassium ions in the glass. And if you imagine those larger potassium ions pack into that glass causing a much tighter and stronger compressive area on the glass. And that's really what gives the glass its strength. Corning employs 400 people at this factory, many of whom are focused on quality control and research as device manufacturers demand thinner and sleeker phones. Corning is constantly having to update and improve Gorilla Glass to try to keep this from happening. What makes Gorilla Glass so strong is the unique composition and glass science behind the glass. That allows us to create this compressive layer that, when it is ion exchanged, creates really a layer of armor and an extra strength that other glasses are not capable of doing.
B2 US gorilla fusion process factory forming trough Inside Corning's Gorilla Glass Factory 7 1 joey joey posted on 2021/05/16 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary