Development of the Combinatorial Glass Formation Tester

Abstract

AbstractThe 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.