Thermal expansion crystallized glasses

The glass-ceramic phase assemblage, ie, the types of crystals and the proportion of crystals to glass, is responsible for many of the physical and chemical properties, such as thermal and electrical characteristics, chemical durabiUty, elastic modulus, and hardness. In many cases these properties are additive for example, a phase assemblage comprising high and low expansion crystals has a bulk thermal expansion proportional to the amounts of each of these crystals. 

There are other sources of nonlinearity in the system, such as the intrinsic anharmonicity of the molecular interactions present also in the corresponding crystals. While these issues are of potential importance to other problems, such as the Griineisen parameter, expression (B.l) only considers the lowest order harmonic interactions and thus does not account for this nonlinear effect. We must note that if this nonlinearity is significant, it could contribute to the nonuniversality of the plateau, in addition to the variation in Tg/(do ratio. It would thus be helpful to conduct an experiment comparing the thermal expansion of different glasses and see whether there is any correlation with the plateau s location. 

A number of other phosphate-based glass-ceramic systems have been investigated. Fine-grained glass-ceramics based on crystals isostructural with NZP (NaZt O ) can be prepared from certain transition-metal orthophosphate and silicophosphate glasses (27). The extensive solid solution possible in the NZP phase provides for a wide range in thermal expansion, with coefficients ranging from —20 to 60 x 10-7 /°C. 

In forsterite ceramics the mineral forsterite (Mg2Si04) crystallizes. They have excellent low-dielectric-loss characteristics but a high thermal expansion coefficient which imparts poor thermal shock resistance. During the 1960s they were manufactured for parts of rather specialized high-power devices constructed from titanium and forsterite and for which the operating temperature precluded the use of a glass-metal construction. The close match between the thermal expansion coefficients of titanium and forsterite made this possible. Today alumina-metal constructions have completely replaced those based on titanium-forsterite and the ceramic is now manufactured only to meet the occasional special request. 

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