New technology of glass casting will allow to get rid of the dominance of plastic

Glass is one of the oldest materials used by man. Due to its chemical properties, this substance is widely used in medicine, optics, telecommunications and the chemical industry.

At the same time, existing glass production technologies have a number of disadvantages. For example, this is an expensive and energy-consuming process, which, moreover, does not allow the glass to be shaped into complex shapes. A simple example: if it is relatively easy to blow a vase out of glass, then creating a gear will be very difficult.

This is one of the reasons why plastic became widespread in the 20th century. This material can be poured into ready-made molds and millions of cheap parts can be stamped in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, which, moreover, will be quite durable, strong and can be painted in a variety of bright colors. Almost perfect material.

Almost, but not perfect. After all, no existing polymer has yet been compared to glass in its versatility.

The new technology, unveiled by scientists at the University of Freiburg in Germany, could radically change the situation. It allows you to mold glass under pressure, giving it any desired shape. This development will make it possible to quickly and economically replace both mass polymer products and high-tech polymer parts with glass. Just in case, we recall that the whole world is now trying to fight the dominance of plastic. After all, the effects that it has on the body have not yet been sufficiently studied. Meanwhile, glass is a much more inert (poorly reactive) material. And it does not disintegrate into microparticles by itself.

The new development was named glassomer.

The casting process begins with preparation: creating small polymer granules, each of which contains tiny particles of quartz glass. These pellets are immersed in a standard injection molding machine. The machine melts the polymer and then pours it into the desired shape.

At this stage, the part looks like it was made of ordinary plastic.

Then the part is washed with water and immersed in an oven heated to 600 ⁰C. In this case, the polymer is partially washed off with water, and its residues are burned in the oven. After that, the part is heated to 1300 ⁰C, and the glass particles in it are fused together (without bricking the plastic in itself, for which intermediate heating is needed). This is how a completely glass end product of the desired shape is obtained.

This technology not only allows for the rapid production of large quantities of complex glass products, it also requires much less energy than the production of conventional glass. In addition, part of the binder polymer (the one that is removed with water in the process) can be reused.

The developers emphasize that the products obtained by the Glassomer method can be used in data transmission technologies, in optics and solar energy, in medicine and for creating so-called "laboratories on a chip".

The details of the new method for the production of glass products are described in a scientific article published in the prestigious scientific journal Science.

Source: https://www.vesti.ru/