Making Glass in a Microwave

For a non-scientist, and if anything, maybe a bit of artist, that was very scientific! Well done.

Be careful with an open microwave. Literally nothing kills more electrical hobbyists per year

The scary bug! You broke the bug!

Use heat sinks from old servers. Some of them are thick chunks of copper and metal. Maybe that can help with dissipating the heat.

Glass eats the bricks. It's not the heat. It's the molten glass.

so there are these microwave glass kits.. you can buy.. uhm yeah but you can also use a coffe mugg as a cover and a ceramic tile.. if you coat the inside of the mug with graphite. and the area youre putting the glass on (the tile) .. but i think the kits are made from some kind of refractory plaster..

Colour of materials like quartz, etc. comes from their internal crystalline structure and the way that different crystals filter & refracts different frequencies of light. White chrystals are highly chaotic internally, which while still letting most of the visible spectrum pass through, will highly scatter the light rays to blur everything together. Perfectly clear glass has an extremely ordered internal structure, which gives the visible light almost perfect pathways to travel along to reach the other side of the material. If it were perfect, then it would appear nearly invisible - with only the random patterns of air molecules bouncing into it creating a faint distortion at its surface. Your blue-tinted glass has picked up some impurities from one or more of your ingredients (or the bowl, or the melted heat brick), causing it to reflect more of the blue part of the spectrum & making it look blue.

I mean I may not know enough about this, But I wonder if that glass is boiling over. As far as your cracking, It probably needs to be cooled much slower. They have microwave oven kilns with silicon carbide on amazon that are capable of cooling it slow enough, and kiln paper might also interest you. I have also seen DIY microwave kiln videos here. but I think heating the glass directly like you and Steve did is more efficient than a radiant heating from the silicon carbide.

The Geometry, The Thicker The Section In The Middle Of The Bowl, The Harder To Melt!

dude this video was awesome, I mean totally dangerous but the amateurish experiment combined with your commentary was funny. Totally worth god knows what kind of fumes you inhaled. P.S, when you pour your glass onto that metal or graphite, pre heat that material with a torch before you pour, so that the glass will cool slower and not crack due to the temperature shock.

I would guess your microwave is just not powerful enough - those small ones are around 800 watts - find one 1500 or greater.

Not surprised the glass turned out blue, even if the ingredients were all white. Ben mentions this in his video I think. In glassmaking tiny amounts of metal salts the color, at those temperatures dyes wouldn't work, so color comes from ionic something-or-other interactions. So the tiniest impurities from stabilizers or other additives in the baking soda or roach killer must be doing that. Also notice the slight green ting regular window glass has? They use iron as the additive for that. Your screw glass is green because of that but at like 1000x concentration

Also the glass cooling down will crack and spit glass shards at you. If you want to preserve what you made you have cool the glass slowly under a hot flame but not a blow torch.

In order to firmly conclude what effects different parameters are making... maybe only change one of them per run. Changing the formula and adding the screws makes it impossible to establish the effects of each.

Your are not moving the mixture around microwave energy comes out in nodes and is effectively stationary. Would not cook very well which is the reason there is a turn table to move the food around under the different nodes. You need to identify the node and place the under it. That's why the block heats in different places.

Nice vídeo man

You need to cool glass- ceramic slowly or it crazes....( cracks or it is brittle). Annealing or so,ething like that. Would love to see another go round with higher powered microwave. So you can heat slowly and maybe an oven to cool it in.

very informative well done I had no idea wow very cool

Why not just use one crucible as a lid on top of the other one? Also microwaves tend to have hotspots; basically interference patterns with bulges and dips. The location you put your sample might completely alter the results. Maybe it helps if you find out where the hotspots are and put your sample there. Not sure if these hot spots are always in the same place though. A rotating platform microwave could help get more consistent results moving through hot and "cold" spots, but maybe not staying in hot spots long enough would mean not getting enough heat to melt, or have side effects from heating and cooling over and over. Anyway, food for thought, research, or experimentation 😊

Dude, this is an interesting video but you need to invest in some more safety equipment. I was just waiting for something to explode and maim you. Which is not the kind of views you want for your new Youtube channel. Also, Sodium Carbonate is also known as "Soda Ash" and is relatively cheap. Walmart sells a 5lb bag for 15 bucks.