What all is in glass What matireals are in glass?

Answer 1

It really depends on the type of glass. Glass is made from silica, which is the common ingredient in all glasses. From there on everything else varies. One simple thing to remember is that glasses are usually named for their fluxes (with a few exceptions). To get the silica to melt at a lower temperature, a flux is added. Some examples are:

Soda-Lime glass (very commonly used for drinking glasses, windows, etc) has lime and sodium carbonate as flux.

Borosilicate glass contains Borax or Boric acid as a flux

Lead Crystal is a glass using lead as its flux. The lead increases the refractive index, which when cut makes the glass sparkle. Hence it is used a lot in tableware. It was developed expecially for this by Ravenscroft.

Flint glass has flint as its flux

and so-on.

In addition to this glass also contains stabilising agents and clarifying agents.

Coloured glass contains in addition to the above various metal oxides as colouring agents.

for example

cobaltous/cobalt oxide makes blue

selenium or copper or gold oxide can make reds

chromium oxide makes green

tin oxide makes white

silver oxide makes transparent yellows

cadmium can make opaque yellow, orange and red amongst others

some glasses contain combinations of these

The raw mixture of the chemicals glass is made of is called "batch". Often chemicals present in the batch are not present in the melt, as some chemicals are used as catalysts to produce certain reactions at certain temperatures. A chemical change occurs and the catalyst is burned off or changed from one form to another.

hope this helps somewhat