ClearShield Glass Treatment
Salts and minerals (limescale) can quickly build up on shower glass. Unprotected glass suffers from permanent bonding of these alkaline residues. Added to the effect of corrosion from water, it causes staining and physical damage to the surface of shower glass.
This is why water spots become very difficult if, not impossible, to remove no matter how hard one tries! Regular washing will simply not remove them, so the appearance and hygienic environment of the shower are spoiled.
What the end user wants
What the owner of a shower enclosure wants is ease of cleaning, pristine appearance and better hygiene.
Tailored solution
A special formulation tailored to ensure shower glass remains easy to clean and resistant to limescale build-up and staining when under attack from the two substances most aggressive to glass:
moisture (both liquid and vapour),
alkalinity (limescale/hard water deposits and some cleaning products).
Durability Guideline
When used in conjunction with Ritec’s After Care System, Shower Glass treated with ClearShield is expected to perform for up to 10 years before a simple re-application to ensure on-going protection.
How does ClearShield work?
A polymer is a long chain of molecules. It can have any of three basic molecular shapes: linear, branched, and networked. The molecular shape is determined by the functionality of the monomers making up the polymer.
The polymer contains chemically active groups which undergo a catalysed reaction with silanol groups of the glass surface and simultaneously undergo chemical cross- linking of the polymer. When chemically bonding to a silica surface, it is important to optimise the nature and extent of chemical reactions taking place to achieve maximum performance and durability.
Thanks to its unique cross-linking properties, ClearShield reacts chemically with the glass surface and with itself through a strong chemical bond to form a new surface on the glass which is less than one micron thick and is durable and chemically inert. Once cured, ClearShield changes from a linear to a networked molecular chain, as represented below.
How is the performance improved?
In order to further improve the performance of the protection provided by ClearShield, Ritec has developed a new and improved formulation. The polymer, solvent system and method of chemically bonding with vitreous surfaces are unchanged, but ClearShield has a new and more active catalyst system.
The new catalyst: not only increases the amount of available bonding sites and makes those bonding sites along the polymer chain more reactive, but also creates nano-chains of molecules (1 nanometer = 1 billionth of a meter).
The result is a greater saturation of the microscopically rough surface, cross-linking of all bonding sites and the creation of a much denser and stronger matrix still much less than 1 micron thick as represented below.
