Is Glass A Ceramic Material

Glass and ceramics are widely used for making household utensils.

Is glass a ceramic material.

We use a vast range of ceramic materials in the day to day life. Glass is known to be a non crystalline material. A ceramic material is an inorganic non metallic often crystalline oxide nitride or carbide material. The crystals themselves are generally very small less than 1µm and most often very uniform in size.

Glass ceramic is a material that combines two types of materials to form a product that is in a class of its own between glasses and polycrystalline ceramics. Glass ceramic materials have the same chemical compositions as glasses but differ from them in that they are typically 95 98 crystalline by volume with only a small percentage vitreous. Fluoroapatite containing glass ceramic is the preferred material to fuse to lithium disilicate glass ceramics and to high toughness sintered zro 2 ceramics. Glass ceramic material was first formulated at the famous corning company in new york in 1953.

Nextrema tinted 712 3 sheet. The sem micrograph in fig. Some elements such as carbon or silicon may be considered ceramics ceramic materials are brittle hard strong in compression and weak in shearing and tension. A well known example of a glass ceramic is the ceramic cooker hob which has been developed to have a thermal expansion coefficient close to zero.

Apart from making household materials glass and ceramics have found their place in many areas. Nextrema transparent 724 3 sheet. Glass can be called as a type of ceramic. When corning and the iconic french company saint gobain joined forces in 1990 to form eurokera they brought together the top manufacturer of cooking materials with a company that has been leading the world in glass making for over 350 years.

The key difference between glass and ceramic is that ceramics have crystalline or semi crystalline or non crystalline atomic structure whereas the atomic structure of glass is non crystalline. They withstand chemical erosion that occurs in other materials subjected to acidic or caustic environments. Ceramics and glass have many applications that require qualities such as hardness rigidity high resistance to heat corrosion etc. Materials that are initially fabricated as glasses and perhaps shaped using glass moulding techniques and converted to a ceramic to enhance their properties are called glass ceramics.