Development of Glass Ceramic Materials

Low-expansion glass ceramics are widely used as precision parts (see Chap. 4), cooktop panels, stove windows, fire-resistant glazings, cookware, and recently as reflectors in digital projection (beamers). In this section we will focus on the development of transparent glass ceramics used as fireplace windows (colorless) and cooktop panels (tinted). Newly developed translucent glass ceram- 

Glass ceramics are polycrystalline solids formed from suitable parent glasses by controlled heat treatment, so-called ceramization. The glass ceramics consist of varying crystalline phases and a residual glass phase, depending on the base glass composition. 

Depending on the application of low-expansion glass ceramics - we are now focusing on tinted cooktop panels and colorless stove windows further physical and chemical properties are required from both the production and the user side. To lower production costs, fast and effective processing is required for example, tank melting, on-line hot forming of panels, as well as fast nucleation rates and crystal growing are absolutely necessary. Moreover, the application of decoration, which, for example, indicates the hot zones of a final cooktop panel, should be performed at the same time as ceramization takes place, without any influence on the production quality. 

The overall properties of a glass ceramic are determined by its microstructure, i.e., the percentages of the crystalline and glassy phases, the composition of the glassy phase and the type, size, shape, and composition of the crystals. 

Property cooktop panel Field of application cooktop panel stove window cookware 

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Kawai, S. (1999). Development of glass-ceramic material for multilayer substrate in submillmeter-wave application, Proceedings of 12th Fall Meeting of the Ceramic Society of Japan , p. 397. 

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