Hardness Equation for Ormosils

Hardness of ormosils coating on various kinds of substrates is important, and by considering recent progresses in understanding the hardness of ionic crystals or covalent crystals, new hardness equations for calculating the hardness of glasses or ormosils from chemical compositions were derived. When we applied an indenter to the surface of glass or sol-gel coatings, the surface of indenter is a declined one to the flat surface of glass or coating, thus the applied force should be analyzed by using the shear modulus, S, and Young's modulus, E. This is now well accepted for the analysis of hardness of ionic or covalent bonding inorganic materials. For example, by considering the binding energy and plastic deformation, Gilman showed that Hv of NaCl crystal can be calculated by an equation including elastic stiffness which indicated a good agreement between calculated and observed value. For covalent crystals he reported that the strength of chemical bonds could be correlated with the glide (shear) activation energy for covalent crystals quantitatively. These explanations are basically applied to the hardness of silicate glasses and ormosils. By considering both shear modulus and Young's modulus we have derived equations for calculating the hardness of glasses or ormosils from chemical composition, which includes packing density of atoms and bond energy per unit volume has been taken account. The agreements between calculated and observed hardness values for ormosils were comparatively good.