A critical study of the emergence of glass and glassy metals as “green” materials

What is it about?

In 2008, The National Academy of Engineering (NAE – Washington, DC) identified the glass family (glasses, glass ceramics and glass composites) as central to many of the great engineering achievements of the twentieth century: the development of solid state lasers and optical glass fibers, biomaterials, glasses for imaging technologies, and glass films in microelectronic devices.

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Why is it important?

Glass products have a lot of applications in environmental design and engineering because they can solve many special problems and can work in situations in which plastics and metals would fail. Glasses and glass derivates (e.g. glass ceramics and glass fibers) need to be a mandatory part of an environmental engineer’s and designer’s repertoire. In some situations, these materials could be used to solve some difficult engineering design problems. MG materials are a relatively young family of materials (being only discovered and first reported half a century ago). MGs have the appearance of metals and possess a combination of the most desirable properties of glasses and metals: strength, harder than metals, corrosion resistance and many others. Recent, researchers have mostly focused on the synthesis and development of metallic glasses that simultaneously possess high strength with a reasonable amount of plasticity

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