Interviews with plenary speakers of the XIV SBPMat Meeting: Edgar Zanotto.


Edgar Dutra Zanotto.

Glass-ceramics, discovered in the decade of 1950, are produced by the catalyzed internal crystallization of certain glasses containing nucleating elements, and submitted to temperatures from 500 to 1,100 °C. They can present many properties which make of them interesting materials for many applications in the fields of medicine, odontology and architecture, among others.

In the XIV SBPMat Meeting, glass-ceramics will be addressed in a lecture entitled “60 years of glass-ceramics R&D: a glorious past and bright future”. The lecturer will be Edgar Dutra Zanotto, full professor of the São Carlos Federal University (UFSCar), in Brazil, and director of the Brazilian Center for Research, Technology and Education in Vitreous Materials (CeRTEV).

Zanotto became fascinated by glass-ceramics in 1977, when he read the book Glass Ceramics by Peter McMillan, from Warwick University (United Kingdom), while he was completing the graduation course of Materials Engineering at UFSCar. From that moment on, these materials and their crystallization process have been the focus of his studies, first in his Master’s Degree in Physics (USP São Carlos, Brazil) then in his PhD in Glass Technology (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom) and, until the moment, in the research and development projects that he develops with his group in the Laboratory of Glass Materials (LaMaV) at UFSCar.

“Orchid”. Optical microscopy image of crystallization in eutetic glass. Credits: Vladimir Fokin e Edgar Zanotto (LaMaV-UFSCar).

Edgar Zanotto is author of an important production in science and glass technology. There are more than 200 scientific articles, with approximately 3,500 citations in Web of Science and 5,000 in Google Scholar; 20 book chapters; 17 patent orders; 2 books and 4 prefaces of international books. His H index is 34, according to Web of Science, and 39 according to Google Scholar. Zanotto already received 28 prizes or distinctions from diverse entities, as American Ceramic Society, Elsevier Publishing Company, International Commission on Glass, The World Academy of Sciences and CNPq, the Brazilian Federal Research Foundation. He is Commander of the Brazilian National Order of the Scientific Merit. He was chairman of six of the most important international congresses on the glass area. He gave more than 110 invited lectures and a dozen of plenary lectures. He is editor of the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids.

Here is a mini interview with this lecturer of the XIV Meeting of SBPMat.

SBPMat newsletter: – What are your most significant contributions or the ones with bigger social impact in the subject of glass-ceramics? Explain them very briefly and comment what was generated from them (papers, books, patents, products, etc.).

Edgar Zanotto: – I believe that the most significant contributions of my research group are referred to tests and improvements of models of nucleation, crystal growth and total crystallization of glasses. Moreover we developed and tested, successfully, models that describe the sintering with concurrent glass crystallization, besides several measurement techniques and theories of dynamic processes (viscous flow, structural relaxation, diffusion and crystallization) in glasses. The numbers of papers, patents and books generated from these researches are described above.

Optical microscopy image of crystal scratch in isochemical glass. Credits:Valmor Mastelaro e Edgar Zanotto (LaMaV – UFSCar).

SBPMat newsletter: – Please, name some products made with glass ceramics that are in the market and some possible promising applications.

Edgar Zanotto; – Throughout the last 39 years we develop glass ceramics from iron and steel slags and from recycled glasses – for application in civil construction and architecture – and also more sophisticated materials for odontological and medical use. These will be presented in the lecture.

SBPMat newsletter: – If you wish, leave a message or an invitation to your plenary talk to the readers who will attend the XIV SBPMat Meeting.

Edgar Zanotto: – In the lecture I intend to revise the main models of nucleation and crystal growth in glasses and to discuss their applicability to the development of new glass ceramics. Everything will be illustrated with colorful figures of innumerable new products. I hope that the lecture will be interesting and motivating for the students and researchers (experimental and theoreticians) of the areas of materials science and engineering, and condense matter physics and chemistry.

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