An Assessment of Rare Gas Filling Quality of Insulating Glazing Units of the Windows by Ultrasonic Method

Abstract

This paper presents the possibility of applying non-destructive ultrasonic method for quality control of gas filled insulating glazing units (IG) of windows. For filling of IG units there are mostly used gasses like argon, krypton, xenon or their mixtures with the air. There is proposed to determine the relative amount of above mentioned gasses inside the IG unit by the measuring of sound velocity in the spacing filled by those gasses. There is shown and described the functional diagram of the microprocessor based meter realising the ultrasonic control method. Performed evaluation shows that the biggest measurement errors occur while IG units are filled with argon and spacing between glazing is sufficiently small (d=8mm). It was determined that accuracy considerably increases while performing measurements on the IG units filled with gasses of higher molecular weight (krypton, xenon) as much as increasing distance between panes.