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Oxide glasses are one of the most important engineering and functional material families owing to their unique features, such as tailorable physical properties. However, at the same time intrinsic brittleness has been their main drawback, which severely restricts many applications. Despite much progress, a breakthrough in developing ultra‐damage‐resistant and ductile oxide glasses still needs to be made. Here, a critical advancement toward such oxide glasses is presented. In detail, a bulk oxide glass with a record‐high crack resistance is obtained by subjecting a caesium aluminoborate glass to surface aging under humid conditions, enabling it to sustain sharp contact deformations under loads of ≈500 N without forming any strength‐limiting cracks. This ultra‐high crack resistance exceeds that of the annealed oxide glasses by more than one order of magnitude, making this glass micro‐ductile. In addition, a remarkable indentation behavior, i.e., a time‐dependent shrinkage of the indent cavity, is demonstrated. Based on structural analyses, a molecular‐scale deformation model to account for both the ultra‐high crack resistance and the time‐dependent shrinkage in the studied glass is proposed.

The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to investigate the capability of a soft tooling process chain employing Additive Manufacturing (AM) for preproduction of an insert with micro features by injection moulding. The Soft Tooling insert was manufactured in a high temperature photopolymer by Digital Light Processing (vat photopolymerization). The mold cavity was formed by two insert halves, by design; both inserts have four angled tines, with micro holes (Ø200 µm, 200 µm deep) on the surface. Injection molding with polyethylene was used with the soft tool inserts to manufacture the final production components. The diameter and height of the pillars that were replicated on the molded components were characterized by means of a 3D profilometer. The influence of the injection molding parameters on the replication was evaluated using a 2-levels DOE of three factors. The uniformity of the pillars are also evaluated regarding the diameter and height.

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