Glass falls into a category of matter called a non-crystalline substance, which includes other materials ubiquitous in daily life like plastics, rubber, gels and tar. Yet despite its many centuries of use, scientists still don’t have a clear understanding of how glass works at the atomic level. Even vaccines we’ve taken to stay healthy have been stored and transported to us in strong, chemically resistant glass packaging. We’re sitting in buildings with natural sunlight coming through windows. “Consider how often we use glass screens, and data are fed to those devices through thin strands of glass fiber optics. “It has been critical in bringing modern civilization to where it is today,” Mauro said. Glass has played an integral role in the advancement of industry, arts and culture. It doesn’t have any carbon-containing batch materials, and it significantly lowers the melting temperature of glass.” Reflection of progress “LionGlass works toward that goal on two fronts. “Our goal is to make glass manufacturing sustainable now and for the future,” Mauro said. LionGlass, made without carbon-based materials and at a lower melting point, promises to cut this carbon footprint in half, Mauro said. Worldwide, glass manufacturing produces at least 86 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. With LionGlass, the melting temperatures are lowered by about 300 to 400 degrees Celsius, Mauro explained, which leads to a roughly 30% reduction in energy consumption compared to conventional soda lime glass. During the glass melting process, the carbonates decompose into oxides and produce carbon dioxide, which gets released into the atmosphere, Mauro explained.īut the bulk of the carbon emissions come from the energy required to heat furnaces to the high temperatures needed for melting glass - around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,480 Celsius. Soda ash is sodium carbonate and limestone is calcium carbonate, both of which release carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. The motivating factor for finding a new formula for standard glass was reducing carbon emissions, Mauro said. Its specific recipe is protected information until the patent process is finalized. Mauro recently filed a patent application as a first step toward bringing the product, named after Penn State’s Nittany Lion mascot, to market. Unlike other humanmade glasses, the composition for LionGlass is not based on the age-old mixture of quartz sand, soda ash and limestone. Mauro and a team of students and scientists have invented and engineered an entirely new family of glass, called LionGlass, that requires significantly less energy to produce and is much more damage resistant than standard soda lime silicate glass. The composition for common glass hasn’t changed in decades, or even millennia, but we are about to change that.” It’s used for windows and windshields, jars and the cups you drink from. “Historically, that mixture has been the basis for humanmade glasses. “The components are readily available and, if you get the right ratios, they melt nicely and form a durable glass,” Mauro said. Mauro said that’s likely because the composition is made from three of the most abundant minerals on Earth. Silicate glass beads appeared in Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago. The recipe for silicate glass has been used for thousands of years. Anything that can be liquefied can be brought into the glassy state if quenched fast enough to avoid crystallization.” In movies, they use glass made from sugars for breakable windows, and there are dozens of glasses made from metallic alloys. In fact, physicists believe that most of the water in the universe is probably in glassy form. “Any liquid can form a glass if it’s cooled rapidly enough. “In many ways, glass is a state of matter all its own,” said John Mauro, Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State. Instead, they remain disordered, like molecules in a flowing liquid, but frozen in place, rigid like a solid. Glass is made by heating a mixture of materials to molten temperatures and then quickly cooling the scorching hot liquid, a process called “quenching.” Such a rapid transition doesn’t give the atoms enough time or energy to arrange themselves into the highly organized lattice-like structures of solid matter. Neither liquid nor solid, glass is its own phase - a material somewhere between these two states of matter - that owes its existence to the way it is formed. One of the few things scientists know for certain about glass is that its atomic structure is chaos.
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