Preparation and characterization of glass foams for artificial floating island from waste glass and Li2CO3

- Waste glass and Li2CO3 were used as raw material and foaming agent respectively.
- Li2CO3 content and foaming temperatures affected the structures and properties.
- Prepared glass foams possessed good chemical stability for the application.

In this work, a type of glass foam for artificial floating island applications was produced from solid waste glass by using powder sintering technology at a low temperature using Li2CO3 as the foaming agent. The effects of Li2CO3 content and foaming temperature on the microstructure, crystalline phase composition and macroscopic properties of glass foams were investigated. The results showed that the optimal glass foam with homogeneous porous structure, low bulk density (0.32 g/cm3), and high compressive strength (2.64 MPa) could be prepared under conditions of 7 wt% Li2CO3 content and sintering at 750 °C. In addition, the water and acid resistance experiments for the obtained optimized samples indicated that the final product possessed excellent chemical stability.

This figure shows the influence of Li2CO3 content and foaming temperature on the microstructure and properties of glass foams (Llaudis et al., 2009). The arrangement of pictures in Graphical Abstract is inspired by Llaudis et al. In that paper, the SEM images shown in Fig. 5 illustrate the microstructure of glass foams with different temperature and soaking time, which give us great inspiration. In order to summarize and highlight the results of our work, we arranged the SEM images in that way and combined the figure of properties to show the influence of Li2CO3 content and foaming temperatures on the microstructures, bulk densities and compressive strength.227