The solubility of gases in a variety of glasses is an intergral part of the larger topic of gas transport in these materials. Since the classic paper by Norton in 1957, the issue of gas transport in glasses has been reviewed at various times by Shelby and Shackelford. There are numerous practical aspects of this problem with substantial commercial implications, e.g. the outgassing and leak testing of vacuum systems and the thermal oxidation of silicon. Gas transport also provides an excellent tool for better understanding the atomic-scale structure of glasses. There are useful, empirical trends for the variation of gas solubility with modifier ion content in silicate glasses. The structural analysis of these data can provide general descriptions of interstital site geometries.
