Towards a predictive understanding of glass toughening by crystalline inclusions

Ion-exchanged or chemically tempered glass such as Corning’s Gorilla glass was a break-through in the design and production of high toughness glass. However, the pace of improvements brought in by this technology is levelling off. Recently, the industry has turned to another approach to product tough glass: the addition of small crystalline inclusions. However, this brings new challenges in predicting the impact of such inclusions on the mechanical and optic properties of materials.
The goal of this project is to conduct computational studies of the impact of crystalline inclusions on the effective fracture properties of such glasses. We will follow the formalism developed in (Hossain et al. 2014) and phase field models of fracture (Bourdin et al., 2001, Bourdin et al., 2008) to perform numerical simulation to assess how density, geometry, and size of inclusions affect the macroscopic fracture behaviour of glass.

Faculty Supervisor:

Blaise Bourdin

Student:

Partner:

École des ponts ParisTech

Discipline:

Mathematics

Sector:

Education

University:

McMaster University

Program: