Analysis of annealing processes of glass sheets based on structural relaxation model

Since the high resolution glass panel became the main stream of the display industry, the dimensional change of the glass after a thermal process applied during the panel production, in particular shrinkage has become a major technical hurdle for glass substrate and panel producers to overcome together. The shrinkage might incur failure in the layers deposited on the glass substrate and ultimately degrade the optical property. A common practice to control the shrinkage is to introduce an annealing process to the glass substrate between the glass production and the deposition process. In an effort to develop a way of optimizing the annealing process, a numerical method to analyze the shrinkage during the annealing and subsequent deposition processes was developed in this work based on the structural relaxation model of the glass substrate. Then, the developed method was tried out to optimize annealing processes such that there would be little shrinkage in various subsequent deposition processes. ► The shrinkage of glass after thermal processing was numerically analyzed. ► The role of fictive temperature on shrinkage was examined. ► High temperature and long duration were beneficial for reducing subsequent shrinkage.