Glass and glaze

Abstract

I read the article by Mr H Charnock ('The float glass process') in the April issue of Physics Bulletin with great interest, for I recently had occasion to think about the stability of glaze layers on pottery, in which the essential physics is the same. For a liquid layer on a solid the appropriate form of Langmuir's equation is easily derived, and it is convenient to substitute from the surface energy equilibrium relation so as to eliminate the unknown solid–liquid and solid surface energies in favour of the observable liquid surface energy γ and the contact angle θ.