| Abstract Scope |
Most glass is still produced by cooling from a melt which is created by heating a batch of generally crystalline ‘raw materials’, a process which consumes large amounts of energy. This energy goes, not just into melting the batch constituents but into the chemical reactions which break up, or modify, the tetrahedral network structure of the principal constituent, silica.
Surprisingly, the detailed atomic scale mechanisms by which the silica structure is modified are not particularly well understood beyond the generic “introduction of modifiers creates NBO”.
In this presentation, molecular dynamics simulations of the melting of a model soda-lime-silica batch are discussed. The simulation box was populated with six crystallites of cristobalite and single crystallites each of Na2O and CaO, and then melted by heating to various temperatures for various times. The resulting MD trajectories were then analysed to reveal the atomic scale processes behind the formation of the melt. |