Traveling by car or train means looking around the windows. You probably don’t just look at the landscape, but at all the vehicle interior elementsthe closest being the edge of those windows. A common element on the train and on the car window is a black border with a curious pattern of dots that become smaller as the rows increase.
It is not paint or an aesthetic element, but something that fulfills a crucial technical function to protect the integrity of the glass. They are called ‘frit band‘ either ‘frits‘, and it is one of the most important passive safety elements that these vehicles have.
The Science of Car Window Blackheads
Although it seems like it, these dots are not paint: they are ceramics baked at very high temperatures, which fuses with glass during manufacturing of the same. He process It is most curious, since first the still hot black ceramic paste is applied to the edges of the glass, and then it is baked together with the glass in the tempering and bending process.
It is a structural element of glass and this process involves a permanent bond that does not wear over time. The dot pattern motif, known as “gradient matrix”it is not a whim either, but a solution to something that could spontaneously break the car window.
Black glass absorbs much more heat than clear glass, and this is something you can easily check on a sunny day: the black band will be hotter than the rest of the glass. When the temperature is extreme, and on trips where the moon can being hit by small stonesif there were an abrupt temperature transition between the black border and the transparent area, stress points would be created that could cause cracks.
That’s why they pulled out that gradient that works like a processor heatsink: creates a thermal transition zone which distributes heat more evenly. It is something that provides protection to the glass, but they serve something else: to help the bond between the chassis and the glass.
On the perimeter of the crystals there is glue that joins the elements, and the ‘frits’ have a rougher texture that allows a better adhesion from glass to chassis. Also, being black, they protect the glue against ultraviolet rays, maximizing its durability and the security of the union of the components.
A detail from Jeep, which introduced an Easter egg in these frits
In the end, what might seem like a simple aesthetic element fulfills an important safety function. In the train, this adhesion and thermal dissipation, and in the car, added to the above, greater resistance of the moon to shocks. In some cars it has been used to place a nod, and the fact that they are circles and not another geometric element has an aesthetic part, but also functional because it makes us overlook them while driving.
It is one more example of all that everyday technology that surrounds us and that perhaps we always wonder if it would have some function, but once that initial curiosity passes, we forget to look.
Images | Jeep, Abil Saputra
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The hundreds of black dots on train and car windows are not a whim: they are a shield called ‘frits’
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Xataka
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Alejandro Alcolea
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