22 April

I love glass. Materials engineering, the cutting edge of all engineering, and modern life. (If your kids are looking for something to study, it’s a brilliant field.) Here’s another glimpse into that work, the production of flat glass. We all see vast sheets of beautiful flat glass used everywhere these days. How they make it is fantastic. The ingredients for the glass are melted, and then poured onto a huge ‘bath’ of molten tin. As the liquid glass settles on that bath, it becomes perfectly flat, and hardens. It then slides off onto rollers, where it cools, and is then cut. This is a picture inside the molten tin bath. You wouldn’t want to be in there. My focus in materials engineering was ceramics. There are whole universities dedicated to ceramic engineering, in the US. Nobody here knows what it is, if you ask. Without the refractories made from ceramics, which line furnaces like this and the blast furnaces I shared a while back, things like steel and glass couldn’t be made. And of course glass itself is a ceramic. Only ceramics can resist the enormous temperatures. They use refractories on the bottom of spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere too, to stop them being incinerated. But ceramics also include much modern electronics (like superconductors, which I did my honours work on). You can even make ceramics that bounce.