Glass properties play crucial roles in ensuring the safety and reliability of electronic packaging. However, challenges, such as thermal expansion and resistance to acid corrosion, pose long-term service difficulties. This study investigated the impact of the microstructure on acid resistance by adjusting the glass composition. A glass material with excellent acid resistance was obtained by achieving a similar coefficient of thermal expansion to tantalum; it exhibited a weight loss rate of less than 0.03% when submerged in 38% sulfuric acid at 85 °C for 200 h. Theoretically, this glass can be used to seal wet Ta electrolytic capacitors. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was used to analyze the glass transition temperature and thermal stability of borosilicate glasses. X-ray diffractometry (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and Raman spectroscopy were used to study the microstructure of the amorphous phase of the borosilicate glass, which revealed a close relationship between the degree of network phase separation in the borosilicate glass and the degree of polymerization (isomorphic polyhedron value, IP) of the glass matrix. The IP value decreased from 3.82 to 1.98 with an increasing degree of phase separation. Boron transitions from [BO₄] to [BO₃] within the glass network structure with increasing boron oxide content, which diminishes the availability of free oxygen provided by alkaline oxide, resulting in a lower acid resistance. Notably, the glass exhibited optimal acid resistance at boron trioxide and mixed alkaline oxide contents of 15% and 6%, respectively. Raman experiments revealed how the distributions of various bridging oxygen atoms (Q_n) affect the structural phase separation of the glass network. Additionally, Raman spectroscopy revealed the depolymerization of Q₄ into Q₃, thereby promoting high-temperature phase separation and highlighting the unique advantages of Raman spectroscopy for phase recognition.

Synchrotrons provide more and more significant analytical techniques to investigate ancient materials from cultural heritages. New ways to visualize the complex structure of these materials are developed on the basis of elemental, density, and refraction contrasts. The tunability of synchrotron beams owing to the high flux and high spectral resolution of photon sources is at the origin of the main chemical speciation capabilities of synchrotron-based techniques. Among them the full-field X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) imaging technique using hard X-rays is particularly efficient. It allows investigating a significant volume of material with a very good spatial resolution, which is invaluable for ancient material because of their heterogeneity and complexity. After presenting the technique and its variants, we will show its ability to study cultural heritage materials through a few examples.

Sauce glazed wares, one of the most representative Fe-based glazed wares manufactured during the Song Dynasty, are characterized by the yellowish- to reddish-brown color with hue varying with the angle incidence of the light. In this work, representative sauce fragments from different kilns were systematically analyzed by multiple imaging and spectroscopic techniques. The results show that the glaze color is derived from the microsize dendritic ε-Fe₂O₃ crystals in the glazes. The crystals are distributed in the whole glaze with obvious multi-layers, enhancing the coloring ability. Besides, numerous magnetite were observed in the glaze cross-section, giving rise to darken the glaze. In addition, the dendritic crystals are composed of comb-like secondary branches with an offset of hundreds of nanometers. Such a selective oriented structure could react with the incident light to generate structural color, giving rise to the glaze appearing angular heterochromism.