Abstract
The need for sustainable solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of the ceramics and glass industry leads towards the development of new electric current-assisted technologies. Flash sintering-like processes in glasses allow a reduction of the softening temperature and could pave the way for new shaping technologies. Herein, we investigated the flash transition in soda-lime silicate glass using two different electrode materials, silver, and platinum. The high dielectric strength registered on samples tested with platinum electrodes undergoes a significant reduction when silver is used. In other words, in the case of silver electrodes, the flash ignition takes place at a lower onset field. Moreover, the Joule heating developed during the process can be turned from being highly inhomogeneous with Pt electrodes to homogeneous when Ag electrodes are used.
Highlights
The development of sustainable processing technologies, driven by the interest to reduce energy consumption and the carbon footprint, is a fundamental challenge for the 21st-century industry
The electric field was increased stepwise by 50 V cm−1 every
This is related to the fact that conduction in glasses is a thermally activated phenomenon that is enhanced at a high temperature, and the present findings are in substantial agreement with previous results obtained for different ceramic systems under flash sintering (FS) [12]
Summary
The development of sustainable processing technologies, driven by the interest to reduce energy consumption and the carbon footprint, is a fundamental challenge for the 21st-century industry. The use of electric currents and fields to induce internally generated heating by the Joule effect [1] has already been recognized as a powerful tool to facilitate material processing. Electric current-assisted processes are wellestablished in the field of metals manufacturing [2,3], e.g., in the automotive industry [4], but they are still under investigation for ceramics and glasses [5,6,7,8,9]. FS is based on the application of an electric field to a ceramic green body, typically in “warm” conditions (i.e., at temperatures well below those required for conventional sintering), resulting in sudden densification (a matter of seconds) of the component. Because of the transition from being insulator-like to conductor-like at the flash onset, the process is typically divided into three stages: Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland
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