photo by: Sara Shepherd

A shattered glass pane on the Naismith Drive side of Kansas University's DeBruce Center is pictured Monday, June 20, 2016.

My Tuesday post about the broken glass pane at Kansas University’s new DeBruce Center being attributed to shifting seems to have caused some alarm. KU Memorial Union and construction people felt like a more scientific explanation was needed.

Here goes.

The building isn’t sinking and falling down (which certainly would be alarming), but rather the breakage probably resulted from expansions and contractions on a much more minute level. Lisa Kring, KU Memorial Unions director of building services, said a flaw in the glass is the likely culprit.

In the glass world this kind of failure is referred to as “spontaneous glass breakage,” though technically there is a cause.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

A shattered glass pane on the Naismith Drive side of Kansas University's DeBruce Center is pictured Monday, June 20, 2016.

According to a couple articles that I read (here’s one, another and another), such shattering for no apparent reason can stem from a tiny (smaller than a tenth of a millimeter) flaw in the glass called a nickel sulfide inclusion. The impurity can weaken the glass enough to make it susceptible to even slight pressures that wouldn’t affect a pane of glass without such an imperfection.

Bob Rombach of KU Design and Construction Management, the special project manager for DeBruce, said such pressures could include expansion or contraction due to heat, or even one of the bolts holding the pane in place being a little bit too tight. (I think it’s fair to assume that building shifting, should it occur, also would put a flawed glass pane over the edge.)

“The reason why it failed is a little bit of a mystery,” Rombach said. “Every once in a while one of them will fail. It’s covered under warranty, and it gets replaced.”

Rombach said the panel broke about a week ago and that it was removed Wednesday morning. Each panel is double-paned, so there’s still one pane of intact glass in the space. Since each panel is custom made, it will take nine weeks or more to get a new one shipped and put in. Rombach said they followed the same process for the other panel that shattered, during the building’s construction.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

A shattered glass pane on the Naismith Drive side of Kansas University's DeBruce Center is pictured Monday, June 20, 2016.

As for other buildings on campus with the same type of glass, Rombach said he was unaware of any. While sketches for the new Central District student union and integrated science buildings show buildings with large sections of glass, Rombach said it’s highly unlikely they’ll use the same fancy glass, from a company called Novum, and “structural glazing” installation system as the DeBruce Center — which makes it look like a glass box instead of just a building with big glass windows.

“This was a donor building,” Rombach said. “The donor wanted a very special Kauffman Center (for the Performing Arts), museum-level of construction,” he said. “It’s high-end stuff.”

The $21.7 million DeBruce Center, all donor-funded, opened in April at 1647 Naismith Drive, connected to Allen Fieldhouse. The building houses James Naismith’s original rules of “Basket Ball.”

I did call J.E. Dunn Construction Co., which built the Kauffman Center, to ask if they’d had breakage problems with the all-glass portion of the building. A company spokeswoman said a small percentage of glass failure due to nickel sulfide inclusion is expected, but that the Kauffman Center has had only a couple panels break since construction was completed in 2011.

Hopefully DeBruce didn’t end up with a bad batch of glass or something. Time will tell. Let me know if you see any more broken windows.

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• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage at KUToday.com. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.