Glass Crystallization Research - A 36-Year Retrospective. Part II, Methods of Study and Glass-Ceramics

Most of our original studies on the fundamental scientific aspects of glass crystallization were reviewed in Part I of this article. In this part, we describe some relevant methods we developed to study glass crystallization and review a number of systematic studies that we conducted to develop, improve, or characterize some types of glass-ceramics, such as bioactive glass-ceramics; photo-thermo-refractive glasses (or glass-ceramics because the active components are sodium fluoride nanocrystals embedded in a glass matrix); new glass-ceramics derived from blast furnace and steel-making slags (hard materials for architecture and construction); sintered glass-ceramics that emulate expensive stones such as marble and granite; and the first large-grain, highly crystalline optically transparent glass-ceramic.