Environmentally Friendly and New Generation Glasses for Plasma TV

Glass plays an important role in the manufacturing of plasma display panel (PDP), that is, plasma TV. Glass is not only used there as front and back panel substrates, but also in its several components, such as front panel transparent dielectric (TD) layer, back panel opaque or white dielectric (WB) layer, barrier rib (BR) and sealing material in between front and back panels. In all the later cases, presently PbO is used in the tune of 60-80 wt% as a glass constituent. It is, therefore, essential to replace the PbO from glass compositions due to health and environmental issues keeping their existing properties unaltered. In this paper, an overview on the available PDP glasses and some of their key properties are reported. In addition, recent development carried at this institute on environmentally friendly lead-free dielectric glasses for plasma TV is briefly described. A low softening and dielectric constant lead-free ZnO-P2O5 based glass composition was also developed for manufacturing plasma TV in consideration of costeffectiveness. We believe that this work will open up a new horizon in the plasma TV research and reduce its manufacturing cost significantly as well