Glasses

Glasses and glass ceramics are key materials in our modern society. They are present in our everyday life in cell phone screens, cooktops, food and beverage recipients, medicine vials, human body protheses, and they have revolutionized long-distance communication. They have revealed to us the microscopic and astronomical worlds raising human knowledge to exceptionally high level for the past two hundred years. It is a vast chemical and topological flexibility, combined with unique processing methods that gives glasses an extremely wide design and property space. This flexibility allows continued material and technological innovation but also brings along fundamental challenges in processing, while preserving structural stability, and property targeting. Increasing demands on sustainable and energy efficient production, for specialized applications require novel approaches to glass development with higher predictability and shorter development times.

To address these challenges, we collaborate with academic and industrial partners on both, fundamental and technological development of automated data-driven approaches as the future backbone for sustainable and highly reproducible glass production and characterization. In addition to implementing modern digital tools for chemical and structural design of glasses, we support the discovery and safe use of advanced glasses or glass-ceramics for the energy sector, hydrogen economy, medical technology, etc. Among our focus and available expertise are mechanical, thermo-kinetic, spectroscopic, and optical properties of glasses.

Our research activities rely on strong ties between fundamental research and interconnected processing and diagnostics, enabling us to contribute to the innovation and safe employment of a millennial old, yet high-tech material, with limitless promise of applications.