Development of the Combinatorial Glass Formation Tester
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Development of the Combinatorial Glass Formation Tester Satoru Inoue, Shin-ichi Todoroki, Takehisa Matsumoto, Takaharu Hondo1, Tetsuo Araki1 and Toshio Tsuchiya1 Advanced Materials Laboratory, National Institute for Materials Science, Namiki 1-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044 Japan. 1Dept. of Materials Science and Technology, Science University of Tokyo, Ymazaki 2641, Noda, Chiba 278-8510, Japan. ABSTRACT The combinatorial glass formation tester has been developed to determine the glass forming regions as quickly as possible. The 24 glass batches of about 1g were put into each carbon crucible on a carbon holder and heated in an electric furnace filled with dry nitrogen gas. After about a half an hour heating, the crucibles were taken out from the furnace and moved into the cooling chamber purged with dry nitrogen gas. The holder and the crucibles were moved on to a cooling stage to be cooled down quickly with a water flowing jacket together with nitrogen gas blowing. The time interval after taking out of the crucibles till the placement on the cooling stage was shortened as much as possible, resulting to be 10sec. The temperature of the melt in the crucibles was measured with an optical pyrometer to estimate the cooling rate. The top view of the crucibles on the holder was taken with a CCD camera during cooling. The CCD figures were stored on a computer for the judgments of the transparency of the samples in the crucibles to compile a glass forming region. The glass formation tester can manage 24 glass melting tests every 1 hours. In other words, the tester can produce at least 192 glass samples (24 x 8=192) within a day working time. The speed was roughly 100 times larger than the case of manual operation. INTRODUCTION The determination of glass forming region is the most important process in the field of glass science and technology. For the first step in the development of new glasses, the glass researchers melt the batches in containers with electric furnaces and pour the melts onto metal or carbon plates to test the glass forming tendency. The process is very simple but forces the researchers to spend much time on a lot of tests. When thinking of the speed up of the research, the method for the quick determination of glass forming region should be firstly studied to develop the combinatorial methodologies. The automation of the process for the glass formation test is very effective to speed up the glass research, leading to the acceleration of the developments of new glasses. The process of determination of glass forming regions consists of three steps. First step is the screening of the compositions in the intended system with the aid of the rules of glass formation deduced theoretically or proposed empirically by the pioneering researchers [1]. Second is the preparation of batches and the last step is melting of the batches and casting of the melts to determine the glass forming region. The authors have been studying the combinatorial methodologies for glass science and technology and have already developed the a
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