Glass genetic engineering

Abstract

<p indent=0mm>On its 125th anniversary edition, the journal, <italic>Science</italic>, listed “what is the nature of the glassy state?” as one of the 125 most challenging scientific issues facing modern science. Predicting glass properties is challenging because of the complexity of the glassy materials, which significantly imped the development of functional glasses. At present, the development of high-performance functional glasses relies heavily on prior experience and trial-and-error, resulting in long experimental periods, high costs, and low efficiency. Materials genome engineering is expected to accelerate glass research. Based on the metastable composition diagram, this paper proposes that the neighboring congruent glassy compounds in the glass composition diagram can be regarded as glass genes. The glass-forming region of a BaO-Ga₂O₃-GeO₂ glass system was calculated by thermodynamic method using the compound’s thermodynamic data. The properties of different glass systems were calculated using the glass gene approach, giving theoretical calculation results consistent with experimental data in the literature. Furthermore, the germanate anomaly can be predicted by the glass gene approach. This work may provide an effective way to decode the glass genome and develop functional glasses rapidly and at low cost.