On August 16th, manufacturer Vitro Architectural Glass began production of its super-sized energy efficient glass panels. The production of these increasingly large panels rely on Vitro’s new $55 million magnetron sputtered deposition glass coater (MSVD) located at their Wichita Falls plant, one of their four facilities in the country.
“The trend in buildings today is large, expansive glass–with some panels over 12 feet tall–that is also energy efficient,” explained Bill Haley, Wichita Falls plant manager. “Vitro can now meet architects’ growing demand for low-e glass in sizes as large as 130-by-204 inches. The coater further enhances our ability to cost-efficiently produce a variety of high-performance architectural glasses that comply with more stringent building codes and meet the industry’s increasingly complex design challenges.”
The coater itself, which took 14 months to construct, is substantially larger than those currently used by Vitro Glass. Measuring just under 120 inches wide and approximately 200 inches long, the MSVD coater allows for the increased production of glass-per-energy-unit
The new MSVD applies Vitro’s Solarban coating, which allows for precise solar and color control. Recent high-profile projects using the Solarban-coated glass include H3 Hardy Collaborative’s Ent Center for the Arts and Cannon Design’s UCSD Jacobs Medical Center.
