What a lunch.

[Gnisy]

Has anyone experienced the case of glass exploding? Glass as in the thing you drink water from. Ya, that one. Was having lunch today in an air-conditioned room when my boyfriend's glass of soft drink (with ice cubes) just... exploded. No, it didn't crack. No, it wasn't leaking. It exploded all of a sudden, spilling the contents all over the table, the chair and onto the floor. We had scraps of glass in our food. I was dumbfounded at the time as I have never experienced this but then I got to thinking, what in the blazes caused this freak mishap to happen?

[LotusEater]

I think, Gnisy, the ice is the clue. It cools the liquid which in turn cools the glass. Did the glass break when you boyf picked it up? The warmth of his hand may have caused a sudden expansion, thus causing the 'explosion'. Particularly if the glass was thin.

[longneck]

This can happen especially in restaurants/cafes/pubs where the glasses are washed in high temperature dish washers. As you can imagine, a glass may go through one of these washers many many times a day. After repeatedly being exposed to high temperatures, then rapidly cooled down, the crystalline structure of the glass can become (for want of a better word) strained. When the "strain" eventually becomes too much, the glass simply shatters. It's very common in pubs and bars

[baileys]

oooh, a very interesting phenomina,never heard of this one

[Gnisy]

Thanks for the feedback.

LotusEater>> Nope, he didn't touch the glass. And the glass wasn't really thin. I'm not even sure it is glass. More like perspex. I mean if someone were to drop it onto the floor it'll bounce back up or crack, rather than shatter like normal glass would.

longneck>> I held the glass as I poured the soft drink into it, it wasn't hot nor was it cold when I held it. It just exploded. We had shards and pieces of glass in our food, the soup and the other glass of drink.

baileys>> u and me both.

[cheater123]

Sounds like paranormal activity to me.

[Catso]

As longneck says, it does happen. I used to work in the restaurant of a stately home and twice I've had a glass I picked up 'explode' in my hands. It's very shocking, but fortunately not too dangerous, as the glass shatters like the old toughened windscreens, into small chunks, not shards.

[Gnisy]

Wow, in my case, the glass just blew up without anyone touching it. I was frantically sweeping small pieces of glass off of him. A friend of mine said it could be that they sterilize the glasses before use. Maybe they didn't wait for the glass to cool down a bit first before putting the ice in. Anyways, I hope it's a once in a lifetime experience.

[stoo_pid]

Glass is actually much more likely to crack (or explode I guess) due to a sudden change in temperature if it's thick rather than if it's thin. This is partly because glass is a poor conductor of heat and partly because its not very fleixible.

Bit more info here

[Catso]

True. It was always the old-fashioned 'chunky' glasses (always reminded me of school glasses) that exploded. Wine glasses never did.

[russbude]

This is caused by a fault in toughened glass called nickel sulfide inclusion. It leads to a phenomenon known in the glazing trade as "spontaneous in-service failure" which basically means the glass will shatter violently without warning. Happens a lot with glass infill panels in balustrades in shopping malls etc.

I suspect the glass in question shattered into loads of little cubes like a car windscreen? I've experienced this with the glass sashes of fume cupboards in laboratories. It can be quite terrifying when it goes off 2 inches from your nose.

Nothing to do with temperature or physical shock - it just goes pop!