Glass-Ceramic Materials: Liquid Phase Separation, Nucleation and Crystallization in Glasses (Glass Science and Technology)

Glass-ceramic materials are new, solid substances that are especially useful because of their exceptional technical parameters, including a wide range of unusual combinations of properties. The characteristics of glass-ceramic materials basically depend on the properties of the finely separated crystalline phase and the residual glass phase which make up the glass-ceramic material. The kind of crystalline phase and thus also the final properties of the glass-ceramic material can be controlled by the initial glass composition and by its heat treatment. In this way, an almost unlimited number of types of glass-ceramic material can be prepared with various combinations of properties, many of which are useful in practice. The production of glass-ceramic materials is becoming a new field of material technology, based on special manufacturing processes, especially controlled crystallization of glasses based on theoretical knowledge, primarily in