ABSTRACT
Silicate-based glasses are one of the most important classes of industrial materials that include container (bottles), window, and automotive glasses and are also used for lighting, domestic ware, optics (lenses), and pharmaceutical ware applications. ere is an enormous range of silicate glass compositions, ranging from ultrahigh purity silica (SiO2) glass for ber optics to borosilicate glasses for immobilization of high level radioactive wastes that contain more than 40 components. Understanding and generalizing the corrosion behavior and environmental resistance of such a large composition range of materials is a scientic and technical challenge. e approach taken in this chapter is that all silicate glasses can be described in terms of one of six surface conditions that may occur at any specic instant in its environmental history.
