Glass Essay
Glass is a non-crystalline, often transparent amorphous solid, that has widespread practical,
technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. Glass is most
often formed by rapid cooling of the molten form; some glasses such as volcanic glass are naturally
occurring. The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of manufactured glass are "silicate
glasses" based on the chemical compound silica, the primary constituent of sand. Soda-lime glass,
containing around 70% silica, accounts for around 90% of manufactured glass. The term glass, in popular
usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, although silica-free glasses often have
desirable properties for applications in modern communications technology. Some objects, such as
drinking glasses and eyeglasses, are so commonly made of silicate-based glass that they are simply
called by the name of the material. Although brittle, buried silicate glass will survive for very long
periods if not disturbed, and many examples of glass fragments exist from early glass-making cultures.
Archaeological evidence suggests glass-making dates back to at least 3,600 BC in Mesopotamia, Egypt,
or Syria. The earliest known glass objects were beads, perhaps created accidentally during metalworking
or the production of faience. Due to its ease of formability into any shape, glass has been traditionally
used for vessels, such as bowls, vases, bottles, jars and drinking glasses. In its most solid forms, it has
also been used for paperweights and marbles. Glass can be coloured by adding metal salts or painted
and printed as enamelled glass. The refractive, reflective and transmission properties of glass make glass
suitable for manufacturing optical lenses, prisms, and optoelectronics materials. Extruded glass fibres
have application as optical fibres in communications networks, thermal insulating material when matted
as glass wool so as to trap air, or in glass-fibre reinforced plastic . Microscopic structure The standard
definition of a glass is a solid formed by rapid melt quenching. However, the term "glass" is often
defined in a broader sense, to describe any non-crystalline solid that exhibits a glass transition when
heated towards the liquid state. Glass is an amorphous solid. Although the atomic-scale structure of
glass shares characteristics of the structure of a supercooled liquid, glass exhibits all the mechanical
properties of a solid. As in other amorphous solids, the atomic structure of a glass lacks the long-range
periodicity observed in crystalline solids. Due to chemical bonding constraints, glasses do possess a high
degree of short-range order with respect to local atomic polyhedra. The notion that glass flows to an
appreciable extent over extended periods of time is not supported by empirical research or theoretical
analysis . Laboratory measurements of room temperature glass flow do show a motion consistent with a
material viscosity on the order of 1017–1018 Pa s. Formation from a supercooled liquid For melt
quenching, if the cooling is sufficiently rapid then crystallization is prevented and instead the disordered
atomic configuration of the supercooled liquid is frozen into the solid state at Tg. The tendency for a
material to form a glass while quenched is called glass-forming ability. This ability can be predicted by
the rigidity theory. Generally, a glass exists in a structurally metastable state with respect to its
crystalline form, although in certain circumstances, for example in atactic polymers, there is no
crystalline analogue of the amorphous phase. Glass is sometimes considered to be a liquid due to its lack
of a first-order phase transition where certain thermodynamic variables such as volume, entropy and
enthalpy are discontinuous through the glass transition range. The glass transition may be described as
analogous to a second-order phase transition where the intensive thermodynamic variables such as the
thermal expansivity and heat capacity are discontinuous. Impactite is a form of glass formed by the
impact of a meteorite, where Moldavite, and Libyan desert glass are notable examples. Vitrification of
quartz can also occur when lightning strikes sand, forming hollow, branching rootlike structures called
fulgurites. Trinitite is a glassy residue formed from the desert floor sand at the Trinity nuclear bomb test
site.
