Coating for glass provides dizzying view of Windy City
Canadian Plastics
Towering above the Chicago skyline at 1,450 feet, Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) is the tallest building in North America. Its newest feature -- definitely not for the faint of heart -- is the "S...
Towering above the Chicago skyline at 1,450 feet, Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) is the tallest building in North America. Its newest feature — definitely not for the faint of heart — is the “Skydeck Ledge,” an all-glass viewing booth that provides a dizzying but safe view, thanks to DuPont’s SentryGlas structural interlayers.
SentryGlas is a prefigured combination of polyvinyl butyral (PVB) sheeting and PET film; the PET film is coated with a proprietary polysiloxane hard coating for abrasion resistance.
Designed to bear five tons of weight, the 1.5-inch thick Skydeck Ledge is laminated with the SentryGlas material for a resulting five times greater strength and 100 times greater stiffness than conventional laminating interlayer materials.
“The Skydeck Ledge is an excellent example of how we’re putting DuPont science to work to protect people and buildings,” said William F. Weber, vice president and general manager of DuPont’s packaging and industrial polymers division. “This high-performance material is designed to withstand high winds and weight loads, so it can be used in places where glass alone could never have been used.”
E.I. DuPont Company (Mississauga, Ont.); www.plastics.dupont.com;905-821-5193
