Oxide glasses are one of the most important engineering and functional material families owing to their unique features, such as tailorable physical properties. However, at the same time intrinsic brittleness has been their main drawback, which severely restricts many applications. Despite much progress, a breakthrough in developing ultra‐damage‐resistant and ductile oxide glasses still needs to be made. Here, a critical advancement toward such oxide glasses is presented. In detail, a bulk oxide glass with a record‐high crack resistance is obtained by subjecting a caesium aluminoborate glass to surface aging under humid conditions, enabling it to sustain sharp contact deformations under loads of ≈500 N without forming any strength‐limiting cracks. This ultra‐high crack resistance exceeds that of the annealed oxide glasses by more than one order of magnitude, making this glass micro‐ductile. In addition, a remarkable indentation behavior, i.e., a time‐dependent shrinkage of the indent cavity, is demonstrated. Based on structural analyses, a molecular‐scale deformation model to account for both the ultra‐high crack resistance and the time‐dependent shrinkage in the studied glass is proposed.
The increasing demand for micro-injection molding process technology and the corresponding micro-molded products have materialized in the need for models and simulation capabilities for the establishment of a digital twin of the manufacturing process. The opportunities enabled by the correct process simulation include the possibility of forecasting the part quality and finding optimal process conditions for a given product. The present work displays further use of micro-injection molding process simulation for the prediction of feature dimensions and its optimization and microfeature replication behavior due to geometrical boundary effects. The current work focused on the micro-injection molding of three-dimensional microparts and of single components featuring microstructures. First, two virtual a studies were performed to predict the outer diameter of a micro-ring within an accuracy of 10 µm and the flash formation on a micro-component with mass a 0.1 mg. In the second part of the study, the influence of microstructure orientation on the filling time of a microcavity design section was investigated for a component featuring micro grooves with a 15 µm nominal height. Multiscale meshing was employed to model the replication of microfeatures in a range of 17–346 µm in a Fresnel lens product, allowing the prediction of the replication behavior of a microfeature at 91% accuracy. The simulations were performed using 3D modeling and generalized Navier–Stokes equations using a single multi-scale simulation approach. The current work shows the current potential and limitations in the use of micro-injection molding process simulations for the optimization of micro 3D-part and microstructured components.