Glass-ceramics are normally obtained by a controlled crystallization process of suitable glasses. Properties of glass-ceramics are affected by the amount of crystalline phases. In this paper, a new, fast, and simple method is investigated to measure the percentage crystallization in glass-ceramic samples. The most common method for measuring the percentage of crystalline phases is investigation of XRD patterns, but in this new method, image analysis (IA) is used for this purpose. Thus, SEM images of two cordierite-based glass-ceramics were investigated by image analyzer software and the variation in crystallization, which were obtained by two methods, were compared. A good correspondence between the results of the XRD patterns and SEM image analysis was achieved, and the difference between the results of these two methods was about 2%. Finally, it was shown that image analysis can be used to measure the percentage of crystalline phases in glass-ceramics with good accuracy.

Keywords: Percentage crystallization, Image analysis, Cordierite based glass-ceramic