Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Glass is a non-crystalline or amorphous solid material that exhibits a glass transition when heated towards the liquid state. Glasses can be made of quite different classes of materials: inorganic networks (such as window glass, made of silicate plus additives), metallic alloys, ionic melts , aqueous solutions , molecular liquids, and polymers .
In condensed matter physics and materials science, an amorphous solid (or non-crystalline solid) is a solid that lacks the long-range order that is a characteristic of a crystal. The terms " glass " and "glassy solid" are sometimes used synonymously with amorphous solid; however, these terms refer specifically to amorphous materials that ...
The structural theories of glass formation only consider the relative ease of glass formation. Materials which form glasses under a moderate cooling rate are called good glass formers, those that require a rapid cooling rate are called poor glass formers and those that require extreme cooling rates are referred to a non-glass formers.
Other materials, such as many polymers, lack a well defined crystalline state and easily form glasses, even upon very slow cooling or compression. The tendency for a material to form a glass while quenched is called glass forming ability. This ability depends on the composition of the material and can be predicted by the rigidity theory. [12]
The most common applications are in the making of pottery, glass, and some types of food, but there are many others, such as the vitrification of an antifreeze-like liquid in cryopreservation. In a different sense of the word, the embedding of material inside a glassy matrix is also called vitrification. An important application is the ...
Metallic glasses, for example, are typically well described by the dense random packing of hard spheres, whereas covalent systems, such as silicate glasses, have sparsely packed, strongly bound, tetrahedral network structures. These very different structures result in materials with very different physical properties and applications.
The refractive, reflective and transmission properties of glass make glass suitable for manufacturing optical lenses, prisms, and optoelectronics materials. Extruded glass fibres have applications as optical fibres in communications networks, thermal insulating material when matted as glass wool to trap air, or in glass-fibre reinforced plastic .
An amorphous metal (also known as metallic glass, glassy metal, or shiny metal) is a solid metallic material, usually an alloy, with disordered atomic-scale structure. Most metals are crystalline in their solid state, which means they have a highly ordered arrangement of atoms .