From the raw materials used to make glass, to the homogeneous liquid made out of the furnace, we may wonder about the steps by which the glass batch is being transformed into a homogeneous liquid. From a chronological point of view, glass making can be considered in three stages : The initial state before reaction of the granular mixture ; The step of chemical reactions between the different components ; A liquid with gaseous and solid inclusions (bubbles and residual quartz). Each of these steps relates to a specific field, with a strong coupling between physics and chemistry. Studying how these materials react together and how the microstructure can influence the overall reaction path followed by the batch is essential to know the mechanisms involved at every moment of the transformation. This understanding could fix some problems related to the making of an industrial glass (bubbles trapped in the liquid, quartz grains not dissolved into the liquid and the liquid chemical heterogeneity). The variety of phenomena involved during the fusion of an industrial glass batch push us to simplify the system, to be able to relate the evolution of the microstructure to the chemistry of the batch. This is why we decided to study the system SiO2-Na2CO3. We have also sieved grains in specific sizes in order to connect the chemical transformation of the mixture to the spatial distribution of the initial granular mixture.
