Germany, together with partners in China and the United States, have successfully produced an oxide glass with unprecedented toughness. They have successfully treated aluminosilicate glasses with a crystal-like structure under high pressure and temperature: the resulting crystal-like structure creates a highly damage-resistant material.
In many ways, glass is an attractive material for modern technology. However, its brittleness can easily lead to cracking and fracture, which limits its potential applications. Previous research methods have attempted to greatly increase the toughness of glass while maintaining its beneficial properties, but have largely failed to produce the desired results.
The new approach, described in Nature Materials, starts with oxide glasses that have a more disordered internal structure, which are the most widely used glass materials in commercial use today. Using aluminosilicates containing silicon, aluminium, boron and oxygen, the research team created a new structure under high-pressure and high-temperature technology at the Bavarian Institute of Experimental Geochemistry and Geophysics (BGI) at the University of Bayreuth.
At a pressure of 10 to 15 gigapascals and a temperature of about 1000 ° C, silicon, aluminum, boron, and oxygen atoms aggregate to form a crystal-like structure. These structures are called "quasicrystals" because they differ significantly from completely irregular structures, but they also do not approach the clear regular structure of crystals. Empirical analysis and theoretical calculations
by spectroscopic techniques clearly show this intermediate state between the crystalline structure and the amorphous regularity. The quasicrystalline structure in aluminosilicate glasses persists even after the pressure and temperature are reduced to normal ambient conditions.
These structures make the toughness of the glass many times higher than that before pseudocrystallization. It now reaches values as high as 1.99 ± 0.06 MPa (m) ¹/². This is the toughness of oxide glasses that has never been measured before. At the same time, the quasi-crystalline structure does not seriously affect the transparency of the glass. The
researchers explain the extraordinary strengthening of the glass by the forces acting on it from the outside, which normally cause cracking or internal cracks, now mainly on the quasicrystalline structure. They dissolve regions of these structures and convert them back to an amorphous random state. In this way, the overall glass gains greater internal plasticity, so it will not crack or crack in the face of these even stronger forces. "Our findings highlight an effective strategy for developing highly damage-resistant glass materials, and we plan to pursue this goal in future research," said Dr. Hu Tang, the first author of the
new study. "
Professor Tomoo Katsura, of the Bavarian Institute of Experimental Geochemistry and Geophysics, added:" The increased toughness due to pseudocrystallization shows that structural changes at the atomic level can have a significant impact on the properties of oxide glasses. At this level, the potential for optimizing glass as a material is enormous and far from being explored. "
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