During the ongoing GOMD meeting in Florida, about 425 attendees are taking part in a series of sessions, activities and appointments, aimed at helping sector operators meet the challenges of glass manufacturing.
he Glass and Optical Materials Division (GOMD) annual meeting opened on 18 May in Miami, Fla., with about 425 participants. For the second consecutive year, the GOMD collaborated with the German Glass Society (DGG) to organize a joint meeting.
According to program organizer Gang Chen, about half of attendees are international, and about one-fourth are students. The technical program offered a few new sessions, Chen says, such as amorphous semiconductors and challenges for glass manufacturing.
“This GOMD-DGG brings together people working on theory, experimental, and manufacturing. Because DGG is here, attendees from US manufacturing and industry were attracted to come, too,” says Chen.
Running alongside the conference are a series of other activities and appointments. The International Commission on Glass is also meeting this week to plan future meetings, including the 2019 International Congress on Glass in Boston, Mass. ICG announced the publication of a special edition of its, ‘Making Glass Better’, which documents the outcome of an NSF-sponsored glass research roadmapping project conducted by the International Materials Institute – New Functionality in Glass (IMI-NFG).
The book’s release at GOMD set the stage for ACerS president Kathleen Richardson to announce news that ACerS was awarded a planning grant by NIST’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology program to form the Functional Glass Manufacturing Innovation Consortium. The FGMIC will identify advanced manufacturing challenges facing functional glass manufacturing with roadmapping workshops and prioritizing precompetitive research opportunities. The USD 480,000, two-year project begins 1 June.
Besides GOMD, the Society’s recently established Art, Archaeology, and Conservation Science Division (AACS) organized a workshop, taking advantage of the weekend between the GOMD-DGG meeting this week and the annual meeting last week, also in Miami, of the American Institute for Conservation. The theme of Sunday’s day-long workshop – attended by about 25 – was ‘what’s new in ancient glass research’.
One approach to researching the activities of the ancients is to replicate their processes and reproduce artifacts. To this end, Pamela Vandiver demonstrated core vessel construction. The process involves melting glass powder over a clay core (in this case firebrick) and adding decorative strips of glass from colourful, softened glass canes. The clay core is ‘martyred’, leaving behind a glass vessel.