2. Thermal insulation evolution

Everyone knows that glass is a very poor thermal insulator, on a par with aluminum. Essential for letting light through and allowing natural lighting in buildings, we had to find solutions to keep heat loss through glass walls to a minimum.

From single glazing, we've moved on to double glazing, with a few attempts at triple glazing in the most extreme cases. With the tightening of thermal regulations, the emerging trends in energy-saving are once again leading to renewed interest in triple glazing.

In the 1970s, triple glazing was widely used in the Nordic countries, and began to be developed in France in the 1980s, before the advent of low-emissivity glass.

Is there a future for triple glazing?

To answer this question, let's take a short detour into physics.