Strength of thin chemtempered lenses: static load testing.

Static load tests were conducted on heat-tempered and chemtempered plano white crown glass lenses from five different optical laboratories. With both ball-on-ring and ring-on-ring loading, chemtempered lenses considerably thinner than 2.0 mm were found to be as failure resistant as 2.0-mm-thick heat-tempered lenses. A similar result was obtained previously using the drop-ball test. It is shown that the theory of brittle fracture can be used to relate the results of different tests and provides a rational basis for comparing the relative performance of chemtempered and heat-tempered lenses.