Obtaining transparent glass-ceramics with high mechanical properties

Abstract

Ceramics with high mechanical properties, especially great hardness and fracture toughness, are frequently studied and used in ballistic protection but they rarely are transparent materials. The present project proposes to study some glasses compositions and thermal heat treatments to obtain a transparent glass-ceramic with potential application as ballistic protection. The starting point will be glasses compositions from the MgO-Al2O3-SiO2 system using ZrO2 as nucleating agent. This material was originally proposed by C. Rüssel and presented not only high mechanical properties but some interesting optical properties as well. The author reported the obtaining of colorless samples which varied from opaque to transparent. Such property is a key factor during the selection of the starting material since transparency would greatly expand the application scope alloying the manufacture of armored car's windows for instance. Thus, using the glasses formulations proposed by Rüssel as starting materials and applying different thermal treatments as well proposing modifications to the original compositions, this project expect to obtain colorless transparent glass-ceramics that present high mechanical properties with potential use in ballistic protection systems. If there is additional time, other glass' systems frequently used in ballistic protection like Li2O - 2SiO2 shall be studied.