Glassmaking in the laboratory
- Also called:
- architectural glass
- Related Topics:
- glass
- glass ceramics
- oxide glass
Glassmaking requires a carefully weighed selection of raw materials. For laboratory melting, a batch is prepared from reagent-grade chemicals such as floated silica, sodium carbonate, calcium carbonate, alumina, and borax—all of which are assumed to convert to equivalent amounts of oxides after decomposition. The mixed batch is placed in a covered crucible and heated generally inside an electric resistance furnace. The crucible is made of suitable refractory materials—for instance, fireclay (inexpensive but contaminating), fused silica (for good thermal shock resistance), and high-density alumina. In order to avoid contamination of the molten glass by refractory materials, it is often recommended that crucibles be made of platinum—either the pure metal or alloyed with 2 to 20 percent rhodium or 5 percent gold. Because of the expense associated with these noble metals, the laboratory glassmaker must be careful not to mix a batch that, upon melting, would undergo chemical reaction with the crucible materials.
Convenient electric-resistance furnaces are temperature-controlled, with programming capabilities. Heating elements may be made of molybdenum disilicide with low thermal mass insulation. Glass may be poured in graphite or steel molds or, alternatively, rolled (using a metal roller) into thin flakes while being poured onto a steel or aluminum chill plate. If fritting, or breaking into small particles, is desired, the molten glass stream may be dropped into water. Blocks of glass can be cut or drilled with diamond-impregnated saws and drills. Glass also may be ground using diamond-impregnated rotating wheels, silicon carbide paper, or silicon carbide slurry. It can be polished using cloths loaded with finer-grained abrasives such as diamond, iron oxide, or ceria.
Industrial glassmaking
The raw materials
Chemical compounds
Glasses of commercial importance are composed of a variety of chemical compounds; these are described in Glass compositions and applications. For glass manufacture on an industrial scale, these chemical compounds must be obtained from properly sized, cleaned, and treated minerals that have been preanalyzed for impurity. Silica is obtained from clean sand. Appropriate mineral sources for soda are soda ash (sodium carbonate) and sodium hydroxide. Lime is obtained from limestone (calcium carbonate) or from dolomite (calcium magnesium carbonate) when magnesium oxide is also needed. In the past it was customary to add about 0.25 percent arsenic oxide and 0.5 percent sodium nitrate to aid in glass fining, or removal of bubbles. These chemicals are no longer recommended in view of hazards to the individual and the environment; instead, less noxious compounds such as sodium chloride, sodium sulfate, or sodium nitrate are recommended.
The constituents of the major oxide glasses are listed in the table.
Cullet
In addition to the mineral ingredients such as those listed above, a glass batch traditionally consists of 25 to 60 percent cullet. Cullet is crushed rejected glass, generally of the same composition as the mineral mixture, that is included because its early melting in the furnace brings the mineral particles together, resulting in accelerated reactions.
The glass-melting furnace
The melting chamber
After a glass batch is mixed in blenders, it is conveyed to the doghouse, a sort of hopper located at the back of the melting chamber of a glass-melting furnace (see ). The batch is often lightly moistened to discourage segregation of the ingredients by vibrations from the conveyor system, or it may be pressed into pellets or briquettes to improve contact between the particles. The batch is inserted into the melting chamber by mechanized shovels, screw conveyors, or blanket feeders. Continuous glass-melting chambers are 6 to 12 metres wide and as much as 30 metres long (20 to 40 feet wide by 100 feet long). They may hold as much as 1,000 tons of glass and produce as much as 50 to 500 tons per day. For smaller production rates, day tanks or unit melters are used. In the large melting chambers, the tank is made of high-density, highly corrosion-resistant refractory materials, such as electrocast alumina-zirconia-silica, to ensure a trouble-free service life of 5 to 10 years.
Natural gas, oil, or electricity may be used to generate the heat of melting. For fossil-fuel firing, the furnaces are often of the regenerative type (see ). In regenerative ovens, firing is carried out in cycles. For half of the cycle (10 to 15 minutes), fuel and air are passed through a hot checker-brick arrangement in a set of regenerator chambers on one side of the oven. The heated mixture is then directed through ports to the melting chamber, where it is burned over the glass melt. The hot flue gases, after exiting the chamber through another set of ports, are directed through another set of regenerators, where they impart much of their heat to the checker-brick arrangement there. For the second half of the cycle, the firing sequence is reversed: combustible mixture is brought in through the second regenerator and is preheated by the checker-brick; this increases the thermodynamic efficiency of the combustion.
Another type of furnace is the recuperative furnace, in which the flue gases continuously exchange heat with the incoming combustible mixture through metal or ceramic partitions. Yet another means of improving combustion efficiency is to use oxygen-rich air or even pure oxygen. The use of oxygen is a particularly important technology, since it greatly reduces undesirable nitrogen oxides in the flue gas. In all cases, flue gases should be transported through heat exchangers, scrubbers, and bag precipitators in order to prevent sulfur oxides and particulate matter from escaping into the atmosphere.
At high temperatures (i.e., above 1,000° C, or 1,800° F) the glass may be conductive enough for booster electrodes of molybdenum, graphite, or tin oxide to be inserted in the tank and provide supplementary heating. Electric melting is by far the most energy-efficient and clean method: it introduces heat where needed, and it eliminates the problem of batch materials being carried away with the flue gases. With electric heating, thermal efficiencies as high as 70 to 80 percent can readily be achieved, whereas getting 40 percent efficiency from fossil-fuel firing is not an easy task. Among the specialty furnaces incorporating electric melting are “cold-top” furnaces, into which the batch is poured or sprinkled from the top. In these furnaces the melt zone is vertically organized; that is, the batch at the top is solid, while molten glass flows out the bottom. The cold-batch method ensures a very low emission of decomposition, vaporization, and carryover products; in addition, batches containing fluorides can be melted generally with little or no escape of toxic fluorine.
The conditioning chamber
In the melting chamber, temperatures reach a peak of 1,475° C (2,685° F) for a soda-lime-silicate glass. At these temperatures, large quantities of gas are generated by the decomposition of raw materials in the batch. These gases, together with trapped air, form bubbles in the glass melt. Large bubbles rise to the surface, but, especially as the glass becomes more viscous, small bubbles are trapped in the melt in such numbers that they threaten the quality of the final product. They are removed in a process called fining, which takes place mostly in another section of the furnace known as the conditioning chamber (see ). From the melting chamber, the molten glass is allowed to pass through a throat in a divider wall, or bridge wall, into the conditioning chamber, where temperatures are held at about 1,300° C (2,375° F). Here the fine bubbles are removed by being dissolved back into the glass. In addition, the glass is homogenized by diffusive mixing. In order to ensure that the composition of the melt is uniform throughout, mechanical mixers or nitrogen or air bubblers can be installed in the bottom of the melting chamber. Special challenges to homogenization can be posed by residual unmelted material from the batch, particularly sand grains, as well as devitrification products, material from the refractory lining of the melting tank, foreign matter such as bottle caps, and vaporization of the various glass constituents, particularly of boric oxide and alkali. Glass homogenization, in fact, is the rate-limiting step in the entire glass-melting process.
The forehearth
From the conditioning chamber, glass is taken in a set of narrow channels, called the forehearth, to the forming machines. The residence time of glass in a tank varies from a half-day to 10 days, depending on the pull rate, or the rate at which glass is fed to the forming machines, as well as the flow patterns established in the tank.
Two problems that may arise toward the working end of the glassmaking process are known as devitrification and reboil. Devitrification, or loss of the glassy state, entails the development of crystals when the molten glass happens to be subjected to temperatures within the shaded region of Figure 1. The most serious threat is the formation of quartz crystals in the throat and forehearth regions. Glass reboil is the rapid exsolution of dissolved gases as temperatures rise. Upon coming out of solution, the gases nucleate and form bubbles in the glass.
Nonfusion glassmaking
Cooling from the melt is not the only route to glassmaking. Glass also may be made directly from the solid, gas, or liquid solution.
From the solid state
A solid may be converted to glass by high rates of shearing (caused, for instance, by a shock wave during an impact), or it may be converted by irradiation with high-energy subatomic particles. The former type are called diaplectic glasses, and the latter type are metamict solids. Some glass fragments gathered from the surface of the Moon may be examples of diaplectic glass formed by meteoroid impacts. Examples of metamict solids are minerals that contain natural high-energy particle radioactivity.
From the gaseous state
Glass also may be prepared directly from a gas. In one process, known as nonreactive vapour-phase glassmaking, elements such as silicon, germanium, and selenium or their alloys are vacuum-evaporated or sputtered and then condensed onto a cool substrate. In another process, known as reactive vapour-phase glassmaking, the desired glass is formed by a chemical reaction. Chemical vapour deposition, or CVD, belongs to this latter category, with a good example being the making of silica glass by hydroxylation. In the hydroxylation technique, vapours of silicon tetrachloride (SiCl4) are reacted at high temperatures with steam (H2O), causing a “soot” of silica (SiO2) to deposit on cooler substrates. The soot is subsequently sintered to a dense glass. (A practical application of this technique involving oxidation of silicon tetrachloride is described in Glass forming: Optical fibres.)
From liquid solution
Silica glass also may be prepared from a liquid solution. In this technique, known as the sol-gel route, alcoholic solutions of organometallic precursors, generally alkoxides such as tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS), are hydrolyzed with water at low temperatures while stirring vigorously. Hydrolysis promotes chelation, or the formation of network-type atomic connections, until the mass gels. The gel is then carefully dried to remove excess alcohol and water, and it is subsequently sintered to form a dense glass. Because high-temperature reactions with containers are avoided in the sol-gel route, it can produce glass of much higher purity than does the melting process. However, the gel route is slow, expensive, and not conducive to obtaining large, monolithic specimens (primarily because of fractures that form during drying). Nevertheless, the method can readily be used to deposit thin films such as antireflection coatings.
Phase-separation techniques
The Vycor process
The spinodal mechanism described in Glass formation: Phase separation is at the heart of the trademarked Vycor process for obtaining a glass of 96 percent silica and 4 percent sodium borate. A sodium borosilicate melt is allowed to separate into two continuous, intertwined matrices of glass, one a silica-rich phase and the other a sodium borate-rich phase. The latter is dissolved out by acid treatment, leaving behind a porous skeleton of 96 percent silica. In the porous shape, the glass (known as “thirsty” glass) may be used as a catalytic support, a molecular sieve, or a time-release capsule. It also may be used as a glass-polymer composite after polymeric liquids are aspirated into the pores and allowed to complete polymerization there. In addition, the porous silica can be sintered to a dense state and used as a substitute for vitreous silica.
Glass ceramics
For the production of glass ceramics, a high density of crystalline nuclei is generated in the glass melt either by the droplet phase-separation mechanism or by the addition of nucleating agents such as titania, zirconia, and phosphorus pentoxide. After nucleation is carried out for a predetermined time, the crystals are allowed to grow to maturity at an elevated temperature.
Glass forming
All traditional glass products such as tableware, containers, tubes and rods, flat glass, and fibreglass are formed of glass made by the melting process. Viscosity is the key property in glass forming. After melting and conditioning (described in Industrial glassmaking), glass is delivered to a forming machine in a manageable shape at a viscosity of approximately 104 poise. At this viscosity, indicated in as the working point, the glass can be worked on to form the desired object and then released in a near-solid condition. All through the process, heat is extracted in a controlled manner in order to allow the viscosity to increase from the levels typical of a liquid to those of a solid.
Beads and microspheres
Solid glass beads and microspheres used in blast cleaners, shot peening, and reflective paints can be made simply by passing finely fritted glass through a hot flame. Hollow microspheres, used mostly as low-density fillers, may be produced by one of many processes. In one method, the glassmaking ingredients are dissolved in water, urea is added as blowing agent, and the mixture is fed through the gas or air nozzle of a burner. In another method, a solution of an alkoxide in alcohol is stirred into a liquid dispersant that causes the solution to break up into small droplets. The droplets are allowed to gel and are then separated, dried, and sintered.
Tableware
Tableware tumblers are made by blowing glass at the end of a blowing pipe into a split paste-mold. The paste-mold is made of cast iron and is lined with a wetted cork-type or pasted-sawdust material. The resulting steam cushion gives a smooth finish to the glass, which is rotated in the mold during the blowing step. The formed ware is then gently knocked off the pipe by a light scoreline, and the rim is beaded using a flame.
Containers
Narrow-mouth containers such as bottles are usually formed by the Individual Section (IS) machine. In this machine a stream of molten glass is pushed out of an orifice at the end of the forehearth by a rotating bowl and is subsequently cut to gobs of glass. The gobs travel down chutes to a mold in which the glass is blown by compressed air to an intermediate parison shape. A mechanical arm then grips the parisons and swings them over to the finishing mold, where a second blowing operation brings them to a finished form. The entire operation, from gob delivery to finished forming, lasts about 11 seconds. The hot containers are then set on a conveyor belt, cooled, and transported to the annealing lehr, as shown in . (See also Glass treating: Annealing.) At the entrance to the lehr, “hot-end” sprays of tin chloride solution are applied in order to impart a hard, abrasion-resistant tin oxide coating to the glass surface, and at the lehr exit “cold-end” sprays of water-based polyethylene emulsions make the surface more lubricious. High production speeds are obtained by using a machine with as many as 12 sections, each section cutting and forming as many as four gobs.
Wide-mouth containers are often formed by using a pressing operation for the parison. In the production of lightweight containers, forming the parison by pressing brings a more uniform distribution of glass than is possible in blowing; this allows superior control of the thinner container walls.
The molds used in container forming are generally made of cast iron, with alloying elements such as carbon, titanium, chromium, vanadium, and molybdenum added to increase oxidation resistance. Lubricants are used to keep the hot glass from adhering to the molds.
Lightbulbs
Lightbulb shells are made on a commercial scale by a ribbon machine. This machine consists of two large upper and lower turrets containing a number of blow heads and molds. A thin stream of glass exiting from the forehearth is fed between a pair of water-cooled rollers, which form a series of patties in the stream. The patties are picked up by the blow heads and, after some puffing operations, are blown into finished shells within the rotating paste-molds on the lower turret while traveling at high speeds along the length of the turret. The ribbon machine is a marvel to watch, with a normal shell-making speed of 30 per second.
Finished bulbs are made by sealing into the lamp shell a pair of suitably chosen metal leads. In common incandescent lightbulbs made of soda-lime-silica shells, the leads are first sealed into a soft glass “flare,” which is subsequently fusion-sealed around the skirt to the shell housing.
Tubes and rods
Tubes and rods are made in three processes: the Danner process, the downdraw process, and the Vello process. In the Danner process, a continuous stream of glass flows over a hollow, rotating mandrel that is mounted on an incline inside a surrounding muffle. With the rotation of the needle, the downward glass flow gradually forms a hollow tubular envelope that is drawn ultimately into a tube. The tube shape is maintained by a stream of air blown through the mandrel. For making rods, a slight suction is maintained in order to collapse the walls of the glass envelope as it leaves the mandrel. In both cases, the form is gradually pulled by belt tractors into a horizontal position, where sections are cut by scoring with a hard tip and advancing the crack with pinpoint flames.
In the downdraw process, molten glass is allowed to flow vertically downward through a defined orifice and is pulled by traction from below. The orifice controls the thickness of the tube wall and the shape of the bore. The process allows the forming of complex cross sections, including oval bore shapes such as that of a thermometer. In addition, strips of a second glass can be fused to the primary glass, as in a thermometer, by drawing a stream from an auxiliary melting pot. In the Vello process, a hybrid of the downdraw and the Danner processes, glass flows downward through a defined orifice and is gently turned horizontal.
Flat glass
The modern method of producing flat glass for such products as windows and mirrors is the float process, in which molten glass is brought over the lip of a broad spout, allowed to pass between rollers, and floated over a bath of molten tin in a steel container (see ). Glass enters the container at approximately 103.5 poise—a viscosity that, for soda-lime-silica glass, is present at a temperature greater than 1,000° C (1,800° F). It is cooled over the length of the tin bath, which has a melting point of 232° C (450° F), and exits in a nearly solidified sheet form with a viscosity of about 1013 poise. Under such conditions glass spreads by gravity to a thickness of 7 millimetres (0.28 inch), but, if it is compressed with graphite paddles or stretched with knurled rollers, glass may be made in thicknesses of 2 to 25 millimetres and in widths up to 4 metres.
Flat sheets are cut by scribing a score line with a diamond tip and gently applying pressure to advance the crack. Flat glass produced by the float method has excellent thickness control and strength. Some tin is picked up by the glass, primarily in the metal-contact face.
Fibreglass
Glass-fibre wool for insulation is usually produced by allowing a molten glass stream to drop into a spinning cup that has numerous holes in its wall. Glass fibres extrude through the holes under centrifugal force and meet a high-velocity air blast that breaks them into short lengths. On their descent to a traveling belt below, the fibres are bonded together with an adhesive spray. The binder is cured, and the wool is gently packed into chopped batts or rolls.
Continuous fibres for textiles are made by dropping molten glass or glass marbles into an electrically heated platinum-rhodium bushing pierced by hundreds or even thousands of fine orifices. The fibres are brought together into a single strand below. By pulling the glass with a mechanical winder at linear speeds as high as 200 kilometres (125 miles) per hour, fibres as fine as three micrometres in diameter can be drawn.
Optical glass
In the optical glass industry, the word flint is used to refer to clear glass of higher refractive index and higher dispersive power—properties that are generic to glasses of high lead content but are not limited to them. Likewise, the word crown is used to refer to glass of lower refractive index and lower dispersive power—properties generic to soda-lime glass.
The key to producing optical glass is rigid control of the refractive index, for which it is necessary to use highly controlled materials with impurity levels lower than the parts-per-million range. Melting is generally carried out in electrically heated furnaces with a platinum-lined tank or platinum crucibles; occasionally melting is conducted in large clay pots that hold about a ton of glass. Molten glass is cast into flats, delivered as a stream directly into mold blanks, or extruded into rods. In traditional optical-glass houses, the glass is cooled in the pots, and good pieces are selected and remelted in order to obtain more acceptable homogeneity.
Optical fibres
Properties
Optical waveguides (OWGs), which transmit information signals in the form of pulses of light, consist of a core glass fibre clad by glass of a lower refractive index. As is explained in Properties of glass: Optical properties: Refraction and reflection of light, when light passing through one medium meets a medium of lower refractive properties at an appropriate angle, it is reflected totally back into the first medium. In an OWG, that second medium is the cladding, and light pulses are reflected within the core medium with very little distortion over great distances. The OWG can be single-mode (carrying essentially a single beam of light), in which case the core diameter is about 10 micrometres; or it can be multimode, in which case the core diameter is usually 50 micrometres, although it can be as much as 200 micrometres. The diameter of the cladding ranges from a standard of 125 micrometres to as much as 300 micrometres. Fibres of this core-clad arrangement, with a sharply defined interface between two mediums of different refractive properties, are called stepped-index fibres. For various reasons, superior performance can be obtained from a graded-index fibre, in which the glass composition, and hence the refractive indices, change progressively, without abrupt transition, between the core and the outer diameter.
Fabrication
The two types of OWG are fabricated in different types of processes. Stepped-index OWGs are made by fusing a glass rod of core composition inside a glass tube of clad composition and then drawing them together. They also are made by the double-crucible technique (see ), in which two concentric compartments of a platinum crucible are fed with glass rods, and a composite stream is allowed to exit a bottom orifice. In either case, the glass fibre is attenuated to its proper dimensions by a high-speed mechanical winder. Between the orifice and the winder, the fibre passes through a laser-monitored diameter-control feedback mechanism and is coated with a polymer, usually containing ultraviolet-cured polyacrylates, to provide protection from surface abrasion.
Graded-index OWGs are made by one of several vapour-deposition processes. The most popular version is called modified chemical vapour deposition (MCVD). In this method, an example of which is shown in , silicon tetrachloride (SiCl4) vapours are mixed with varying quantities of phosphorus oxychloride (POCl3) and either germanium tetrachloride (GeCl4) or boron trichloride (BC13). Heated to 1,300°–1,600° C (2,375°–2,900° F), the vapours undergo an oxidation reaction that produces a soot containing silica and other oxides. This soot is allowed to condense on a cooler substrate such as a tube or rod. The condensed material, which may be composed of several hundred layers, is then dehydrated at approximately 1,200° C (2,200° F) and sintered at 1,500°–1,700° C (2,700°–3,100° F). By controlling the ratio of the chloride mix, the desired composition (and hence the desired refractive index) of the layers are obtained—germanium increasing the refractive index and boron decreasing it. The glass preform is subsequently mounted on a fibre draw tower, and its end is heated to 1,900°–2,200° C (3,450°–4,000° F) inside an induction or resistance furnace or by means of an oxy-hydrogen flame or a carbon dioxide laser beam. As in the double-crucible technique shown in , the diameter of the attenuated fibre is scanned and used as a feedback signal to control the preform feed rate, and the fibre is subsequently coated with polymer.
Glass seals
The sealing of glass to various materials (including glass itself) is keyed to the relationship between glass viscosity and temperature, the differing thermal-expansion characteristics of the components to be sealed, the wetting and adhesion characteristics of molten glass at sealing temperatures, and the chemical durability of glass during service. Hermeticity is often a desired result in glass sealing. A prime example of hermetic seals are in lightbulbs, in which metal conducting wires are sealed through glass in order to maintain an inert atmosphere inside the lamp envelope. Much of modern microelectronics involving thick-film technology also depends on glass sealing, although in this case hermeticity is not a requirement.
For the formation of a successful seal, the most critical factor is probably the thermal contraction of glass. The thermal-contraction mismatch—that is, the differences in contraction of the sealed components as they are cooled—causes stresses to develop in each component. When the mismatch exceeds 500 parts per million, tensile stresses in the glass may cause it to fracture. In order to avoid fracture, it is preferable to have the glass component in glass-to-metal seals under mild compression or to employ glass-metal systems in which the glass component and the metal alloy are known to have closely matched contraction characteristics. When the contraction mismatch is large, sealing may be accomplished by using thin metal wire or a thin glass coating, by employing a compression seal (in which a glass of lower expansion properties is softened inside a higher-expansion metal shell), or by sealing the metal in the form of a thin foil with feathered edges (the Housekeeper seal). Most metal shell connectors with insulating glass and a central metal pin are examples of a compression seal. Projector lamp seals, where a current-carrying molybdenum metal foil is pinch-sealed into a fused silica tube, are good examples of Housekeeper seals.
Common ways of applying sealing glass are as frits and as preforms. Glass is crushed or ball-milled in order to obtain a fine powder, or frit, which is sieved to sizes of 5 to 100 micrometres and then mixed with a small amount of slurry-making organic volatilizing-type vehicles and binders. Metal powders (often flakes) can be mixed in to make conducting pastes, or nonmetallic powders can be added to make resistive and dielectric pastes or glass-matrix composites. The slurry is screen-printed onto the object, which is then fired in air or inert atmosphere in a controlled manner.
Dry frits also may be mixed with a small amount of binder and pressed into a suitable shape called a preform. The preform, made to a shape that is convenient to handle in a subsequent process, can be softened in contact with other components to cause sealing upon heating.