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Porous materials exist around our environment and play an important role in our daily lives to be used widely in many fields, among the fields are energy distribution and storage, vibration suppression, liquid filtration, heat insulation, and sound absorption. Porous glasses are materials that have pores structure using silica as the primary component in all types of standard and specialty glass mixture with a foaming agent and other additives. Porous glass is usually in the size of nanometre and micrometer range. Porous glass is usually prepared by using phase separation, sintering and sol-gel method [1]. This review paper will focus on the various properties of this porous material related to the production process used to their properties and possible applications such as filtering, lightweight concrete, heat resistance insulator, and biomaterials.

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The silica sand deposit located at km 55 Jalan Pantai Kuala Terengganu-Kuala Besut in the District of Setiu, North Terengganu consists of loose sand of fine to coarse grain size which is developed over the raised beaches of marine origin. The underlying bedrock is believed to be either metasediment of Late Paleozoic age or intrusive granitic rocks. The average content of SiO 2 is 99.3% while for the Fe 2 O 3 , Al 2 O 3 and TiO 2 , their average content are 0.1%, 0.3% and 0.2% respectively. The screen analyses show that more than 90 percent of the silica sand is within 150 to 1,180 micron size range. The total area underlain by potential silica sand is about 1.9 million sq. metres with total measured reserve about 2.6 million tonnes. According to Malaysian Standard, MS 701:1981 and British Standard BS 2975:1988, silica sand for making crystal glass should meet the grade B specification in which the purity of silica sand is not less than 99.5% with only a small amount of iron oxide (0.015%), alumina (0.05%), chromium oxide (maximum 2 ppm) and other mineral oxides. In the production of crystal glass, a front loading furnace was used and maximum melting temperature was 1400 °C. After melting process, physical evaluation on the crystal glass products were performed pertaining to complete accomplishment of melting such as existing of bubbles inside crystal glasses. In order to ensure that crystal glass quality meets the international standard, specification for crystal glass published by British standard BS 3828:1973 was taken as a guideline. Some of the parameters are density, surface hardness and refractive index. In general, silica sand from Gong Belibis, Setiu Terengganu is suitable as a raw material for making crystal glass product.