Touchscreen Glass Processing

We offer a number of unique glass processing and strengthening processes, including edge profiling and thermal tempering, offering a reliable, enhanced user experience and ensuring the touch surface is resistant to harsh weather, vandals and more.

Our team will work with you to provide rapid prototypes and solutions that suit your specific business needs.

Touchscreen glass shaping

Our advanced glass machining capabilities allow for precision cutting, shaping and finishing to create custom surfaces. Whether it’s intricate designs, curved edges or specialised cutouts, our process ensures seamless integration and optimal functionality for a wide range of applications.

Touchscreen edge profiling

Edge profiling allows your touchscreen to take on a specific shape or finish. Our team can shape the edge of your touch solution to whatever style you prefer.

Edge profiling provides:

• practical benefits, such as protection against chipping and breakage of the screen’s corners.
• unique, bespoke aesthetics – great for commercial and retail applications, such as interactive advertising signage.

Glass hole and slot drilling

We can provide a unique hole drilling service for your touchscreen designs, allowing for bespoke configurations, such as the incorporation of buttons, or speakers.

Slot drilling also allows for specific additions to suit your business needs, such as credit card readers and ticket printers placed behind the touchscreen providing a single glass surface with a seamless user interface.

This kind of bespoke addition also enhances the user experience. For instance, a protected, yet fully functional card reader is well-suited for use with an outdoor charging touchscreen or self-service kiosk in a high-traffic area.

Bespoke screen printing

With our semi-automatic touchscreen screen-printing machines our team can print touch sensor borders and logos in almost any colour, making sure your bespoke business and brand identity requirements are met.

If you have a specific brand or print border colour in mind, we recommend using low-iron glass substrates. This glass provides a higher optical clarity and prevents the greenish hue that is seen with standard glass.

Curved touchscreens and sensors

Our expert team creates patented custom-curved glass PCAP touch sensors using our thermal tempering and bending processes.

Glass substrates can be curved to your specific shape requirements, ensuring both efficiency and quality. The curved substrates are then converted into PCAP sensors within our state-of-the-art onsite cleanrooms.

This process allows us to design eye-catching solutions, making them the perfect options for the sports betting and gambling industry, helping to catch attention and encourage interactivity.

Touchscreen custom glass thickness

Customise your touchscreen glass thickness with Zytronic:

• 3–12mm thickness range – great for use in transport and outdoor environments.
• 15–20mm thickness range – great for hazardous or hard-wearing environments, such as industrial sites, petrochemical facilities and mines.

Further customise your touch solution for use in hazardous environments with the addition of blast- and explosion-resistant touch sensors.

If your thickness requirements fall outside the above ranges, speak to our team directly so we can find a solution that fits your needs.

Although touch sensitivity is often limited by thicker glass, Zytronic has been able to combat this through years of application-specific PCAP development. This allows our electronics to drive our PCAP technology at a higher voltage and provides an industry leading signal-to-noise ratio.

Touchscreen thermal tempering and bending

We can increase the strength of your glass touch solution through thermal tempering and additionally change the shape of your touchscreen from flat to curved through thermal bending.

During the thermal tempering process, the glass is rapidly heated to around 650 degrees Celsius and then rapidly cooled to ambient level in a controlled manner using regulated compressed air. This purposefully creates tension within the glass interior, which is balanced with the surface compression on the exterior, resulting in a hardened surface.

Thermally tempered glass is 3–5 times stronger than un-tempered glass. It also provides safety benefits; when broken, it will not break into shards, but into granular pieces. This makes touch solutions made from thermally tempered glass, great for use in public-facing applications, such as in educational or medical settings.

The thermal tempering process is only suitable for glass thicknesses of 3mm and above.

Thermal bending, also heats the glass up to circa 600 degrees Celsius, where gravity is used to allow the heated glass to either sag in to a mould or drape over a mould, which once cooled, in a more controlled and regulated manner, shapes the glass from flat to curved.

Touchscreen chemical strengthening

The Zytronic team can chemically strengthen your chosen glass, creating a more resilient touch solution.

The chemical strengthening process (also known as ion exchange) replaces some of the sodium ions in the glass surface with smaller potassium ions, creating a compressive layer. This is done by submerging the glass in molten potassium salt for an extended period of time.

The amount of time that the glass is submerged, together with the chemical composition of the glass chosen and the molten salt, affects the strength of the final product.

Chemically strengthened glass is 15-20 times stronger than un-strengthened glass of the same thickness. It also boasts improved impact resistance, flexibility, strength, scratch-resistance and improved resistance to temperature changes.

While the chemical strengthening process is suitable for all glass thicknesses, it is predominantly used with glass thicknesses below 3mm, due to the constraints of thermal toughening.

Glass touch sensor alternatives

Glass touch surfaces aren’t viable in certain locations, such as the food processing industry.

We can provide alternative solutions in the form of glass sensors with a thin flexible film applied to the front of the sensor, or a thin polycarbonate or acrylic overlay that is mounted in front of the sensor.

Touchscreen polycarbonates and acrylics are still highly sensitive to touch and boast improved shatter resistance – great for use in industries where glass surfaces are discouraged, or even illegal. Depending on the dielectric properties of the material and the way in which the touch sensor is integrated, our PCAP touch technologies are sensitive enough to detect actions through 3mm of overlaying plastic.

It is worth noting that polycarbonate or acrylic alternatives scratch more easily than strengthened glass, so these alternatives are not suitable for industrial or hazardous environments.

Zytronic touch solutions

Our expert team can create bespoke touch sensors and strengthened, interactive touch surfaces that cater to individual business needs.

FAQs