Tobias Rudolf, M. Sc.

Glass is a material that has a special significance in our daily lives. With its physical properties, such as chemical, thermal and scratch resistance and transparency, glass is also used in many technical areas. Additive manufacturing processes (3D printing) open up new possibilities in the production of glass components for optical lenses in lasers or microscopes, for example.

During the manufacturing process, the raw material is melted at high temperatures. This leads to a honey-like state known as a melt. This melt solidifies during the cooling process and produces the desired shape. The speed at which the body cools significantly influences the properties of the final component. Slow cooling results in a crystalline structure which is non-transparent and thus, undesired for optical purposes. In turn,  rapid cooling results in an amorphous structure which is transparent and referred to as glass. We at IKM develop for this complex interplay of processing parameters and resultant microstructure material models to computationally investigate these processes. Thereby, we contribute to the improvement of the quality of additively manufactured glass components by means of computer simulations.