A Century of Developments in Glassmelting Research

This article reviews the progress in studies devoted to the understanding of glassmelting made since the foundation of The American Ceramic Society. After briefly considering some of the necessary preliminaries, the article briefly discusses studies in melting reactions, redox control, refining, homogenizing, volatilization, refractory corrosion, and flow in furnaces. Knowledge of all of these has advanced significantly in the period considered. However, although many aspects of glassmelting can be discussed on a reasonably sound theoretical foundation, the actual behavior of real, multicomponent systems can be predicted only rarely with confidence from the generally available data base. Computers now make it possible to store much more data than ever before and to analyze information in much more sophisticated ways. Nevertheless, there is often a need to continue carefully conducted basic work. The article concentrates on the older work not readily recovered by computer database searches.