The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #131697   Message #2972811
Posted By: JohnInKansas
25-Aug-10 - 05:08 PM
Thread Name: BS: Glass frying pans?
Subject: RE: BS: Glass frying pans?
It probably is feasible, but I haven't seen a commercial product offered.

Corning made a giant leap in thermal tolerance for "glass" many decades ago with the introduction of "Pyrex" which was simply very high purity silica glass. A problem in commercializing that material was that the high purity resulted in very high temperatures for casting/molding.

Some time ca. the 1960s or 70s they introduced a new material that I believe was called "Vycor." With this material, they cast the parts as "Pyrex," then chemically leached out the remaining impurities, and re-fired it at ultra high temps to re-fuse the remaining, almost "transistor pure," silica. (Dimensional control was mediocre, since the re-fusing resulted in about a 15% "shrinkage and slump" of the part, although some things could be ground to tolerance after final fusing.)

During their first attempts to commercialize Vycor I watched a demo in which a rod, about 2" in diameter, was heated to "cherry red" and then plunged into liquid nitrogen with no ill effects, after which the demonstrator used the rod to drive a 16p nail into a block of wood.

Vycor had little commercial success, due to the expensive processing required; but I've recently seen releases about a "new glass" that very much resembles it (from the scant info in press releases), so it would seem quite possible that someone could make you a glass skillet. With progress in plasma beam heating, one could theoretically heat the glass without heating (as severely) the mold(?).

I'd expect it to be very expensive, and perhaps even heavier than cast iron.(?) Probably not likely to appear in my kitchen any time soon.

John