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Glass and Ceramic Composites for High Technology Applications

Final Report Summary - GLACERCO (Glass and Ceramic Composites for High Technology Applications)

Glass and Ceramic Composites for High Technology Applications - GlaCERCo-ITN. www.glacerco.eu
New high-tech glass-based materials (glasses, glass-ceramics, glass- and glass-ceramic composites and fibres) are themselves an emerging supra-disciplinary field: expertise of these new materials brings competitiveness in strategic fields, such as medicine (bioactive glasses as bone replacement and drug delivery systems), telecommunications (glass devices for broad-band applications), photonics (glass based photonic sensors), clean energy (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells glass sealants, thermoelectric materials), waste management (vitrification and re-use of wastes), oil and gas exploration and carbon capture (glass reinforced plastic pipes). GlaCERCo aimed to develop advanced knowledge of glass based materials and to develop innovative, cost-competitive and environmentally acceptable materials and processing technologies.

The GlaCERCo project has been successfully completed at the end of January 2015. Seventeen early stage researchers, ESRs, and six experienced researchers, ERs, have been recruited and trained within this innovative training programme (56% women). They participated in: the GlaCERCo School, four network-wide workshops, two entrepreneurship and project management workshops and several inter-sectorial training events.
The inter/multi-disciplinary and -sectorial characteristic has been guaranteed by the presence, within this consortium, of five academic partners and five companies, from six countries, having top class expertise in glass science and technology, modelling, design, characterisation and commercialisation of glass and composite based products.
The methodologies implemented in the GlaCERCo project have led to international recognised scientific outcomes (i.e. about 65 papers already published in international journals, conference proceedings and one international patent application; several papers submitted to international journal or under preparation). The GlaCERCo special issue of Advances in Applied Ceramics: Structural, Functional and Bioceramics will be published before summer 2015 (open access).
One of the key aspects of the GlaCERCo project was its interdisciplinary nature. Young researchers have been exposed to a wide range of activities, which complements their area of research and diversifies their scientific knowledge. This is of particular importance for future career choices and perspectives as it avoids the common pitfall of young researchers focussing heavily in one field, and having difficulty finding a position after a specific research & training project. It also gave them the opportunity to establish a strong network with other fellow researchers as well as the industrial partners and senior professors working in several different areas that they will be able to utilise in subsequent work as their careers progress. Besides, the level of satisfaction of the fellows was 94% (evaluated by a questionnaire) and the employment rate immediately after their GlaCERCo training is higher than 80% (40% in the private sector).

The GlaCERCo ITN provides training-through-research in five selected themes:

- Vitrification and reuse of waste (e.g. municipal waste incinerator bottom ashes, mining residues, air pollution control residues, etc.) and investigation of the reuse of the so obtained glasses and glass-ceramics as raw material for the manufacturing of building materials with improved properties (production of sintered – monolithic or cellular – glass-ceramics, or modification of traditional ceramic tiles), or as new sustainable building materials and special cement production.
GlaCERCo researchers developed new porous glass-ceramic insulation materials from waste with properties comparable to the commercial ones. This new product has been patented and has great potential for a quick market uptake. It has been also demonstrated that waste-derived glass-ceramics can replace porous stoneware tiles. A highly porous substrate, from direct sintering of recycled glass and inorganic waste, has been coated with a waste-derived dense glass-ceramic layer. Low water absorption (below 2%) and good mechanical properties are coupled with stabilization of pollutants. Besides, the results of this work showed that vitrified biomass ash is characterised by pozzolanic activity and latent hydraulicity that could be exploited for the manufacture of low embodied energy concrete.

- Development, characterisation and life integrity management of advanced composites (polymer, ceramic and glass matrix composites) with improved mechanical properties. Composite materials are fast becoming a material of choice for several industrial applications (such as petrochemical industry, glass industry, armour applications, etc.) because of their excellent resistance to aggressive chemicals, their low specific weight and stiffness and potential lower cost of manufacturing compared with high corrosion resistant alloys. The reinforcements studied included glass fibres, carbon nanotubes, boron nitride nanotubes and graphene.
The new composites, developed within this work, show higher fracture toughness, hardness, elastic modulus and electrical properties compared with the matrix materials. The new composites can be exploited for various applications including electrical (electrical components), aerospace, petrochemical and other glass industries. In addition, GlaCERCo fellows developed an experimental method for realistic, single sided, exposure of composite pipe materials under extreme environments and a life predictive methodology (software code) for composite pipes subject to ageing.

- Design, synthesis and characterisation of special glasses for photonic devices and thermoelectric applications. The glass matrices (oxide and non-oxide glasses) have been designed and prepared according to the requested application: optical fibres for telecommunications and fibre lasers, photosensitive glasses, optical sensors for infrared sensing, thermoelectric application.
GlaCERCo researchers successfully developed borosilicate glasses for 1.5 µm lasers with improved emission properties and reduced power losses and easy-to-draw innovative tellurite fibres. The new tellurite fibres have a low attenuation, are able to detect vibrational bands beyond 12 µm and can be used as sensors for Fiber Evanescent Wave Spectroscopy. New stable tellurite glasses for thermoelectric applications exhibiting a low resistivity and a high stability were also obtained.

- Design, preparation and characterisation of new glasses suitable for medical applications: drug release (bioactive glasses and microcellular ceramics), bone substitution (i.e. glass and glass-ceramic macroporous scaffolds) and arthroprosthesis (i.e. bioactive glasses and composites). An integrated approach to the application of bioactive glasses in the biomedical field, from materials development to in vitro tests, has been pursued, including also a comprehensive comparison with available biomaterials to highlight the advantages (and possible disadvantages) of the new bioactive materials in the different selected applications. The innovative glass, glass-ceramic and composite coatings and scaffolds developed by the GlaCERCo young researchers showed improved mechanical properties and bioactivity with very good prospective for their further exploitation (for example in bone healing clinical devices).

- Joining and coating of different materials: innovative joining and coating materials have been especially designed for specific applications (e.g. bioactive scaffolds and implants, solid oxide fuel cells, SOFCs, petrochemical industry). The coating and joining materials have been prepared and applied by slurry methods, colloidal processing including electrophoretic deposition, sputtering etc. GlaCERCo researchers developed new hybrid organic-inorganic coatings composed by a bioactive glass and a natural-derived polymer. These coatings were shown to enhance the apatite forming ability of the glass and to accelerate the bioactivity mechanism.
The electrophoretic deposition (EPD) technique has been used to produce protective coatings for SOFC metal interconnects. The coatings showed excellent electrical properties and can effectively act as a barrier to outward diffusion of Cr. In addition, a new self-heling glass-ceramic sealant has been designed, produced and validated. The new sealant can be used to join the ceramic electrolyte to the metal components directly during the SOFC stack assembly.
During this project, it was also demonstrated that embedded glass fibre based evanescent sensors were able to detect the early stage of moisture diffusion in glass reinforced polymer (GRP) composites under hostile environments. The extremely low cost, associated with the production of these sensors, will allow them to be applied to the development of smart coatings for GRP. Besides, the incorporation of photonic sensors into GRP for the hostile environments found in the oil and gas industry provides great development potential for this strategically important area, as well as other critical industries such as aerospace and renewable energy systems such as wind turbine blades.

Main contacts: Monica Ferraris, monica.ferraris@polito.it and Milena Salvo, milena.salvo@polito.it Department of Applied Science and Technology, Politecnico di Torino (www.glacerco.eu).
Logo in the "MC GlaCERCo.pdf" attached file.