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Nonmetallic material, or in nontechnical terms a nonmetal, refers to materials which are not metals. Depending upon context it is used in slightly different ways. In everyday life it would be a generic term for those materials such as plastics, wood or ceramics which are not typical metals such as the iron alloys used in bridges.
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 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 .
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 ...
Unless stated otherwise, the properties of fused silica (quartz glass) and germania glass are derived from the SciGlass glass database by forming the arithmetic mean of all the experimental values from different authors (in general more than 10 independent sources for quartz glass and T g of germanium oxide glass). The list is not exhaustive.
An everyday life example for the need for materials with tailored thermal expansion are dental fillings. If the fillings tend to expand by an amount different from the teeth, for example when drinking a hot or cold drink, it might cause a toothache.
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]