Systematic tailoring of functional properties of glass material in protective mask for smart manufacturing

Among the systems aimed to support the smart manufacturing, the protective masks based on smart glass able to adapt their optical properties to the light condition, where operators work, are analyzed. Their design requires a precise selection of material and tailoring the system properties to operation. A straight trade-off between commercial products is rather difficult, since a quantitative model based approach is seldom applicable, in this case, to describe the electro-optical coupling. Physical modelling has to be integrated with other tools, to define an optimized configuration. A systematic approach is here applied, not only to define the best system layout, but even the intrinsic composition of materials, as is needed by the technical domain of steelmaking. This study might be interpreted as a paradigm for the tailored design of functional material based systems.