When glass breaks due to high temperature, does it burst or crack?

Answer 1

It depends on the glass. Regular glass will just crack if heated (or cooled once hot) too quickly and nonuniformly. Tempered glass with burst into thousands of pieces due to the rapid release of internal stress intensionally built into the glass for just such a purpose. I've seen this happen, and "burst" is an appropriate description. It's not exactly an explosion, but it makes a big popping sound and is too fast to see happening. The idea is that being hit with myriad tiny pellets of glass is safer than big shards.

Answer 2

Glass would break "due to high temperature" only if there's thermal shock involved, where there could be large temperature differences inside the glass Otherwise, the glass would just eventually melt. Now, "large temperature differences" inside the glass usually doesn't produce significant enough internal pressure for the glass to explode, rather than just fracture. Under certain, carefully prepared conditions, it's possible to make it explode, as in the following case: Imagine a solid ball of glass, and imagine having an electric heating element at the center of it, through which we send a huge electric current, thereby nearly instantaneously heating the core to high temperatures and causing the glass to expand. The outside shell of the glass still being cold, this can result in a large internal pressure, which can effectively make this glass ball a bomb.

Answer 3

Glass being brittle, breaks or rather cracks. Bursting is cracking when a sudden outward pressure is exerted against walls of a vessel which cannpt yield. Glass 'shatters'

Answer 4

glass isn't a very good conductor of heat... when you fill it with hot water for example, the inside of the glass expands from the heat, but the outside doesn't expand at the same time because it takes time for the heat to get to the outside... therefore, the glass cracks as a result of the uneven expansion.

Answer 5

It cracks.