“…The best results in terms of increasing the fracture tolerance and imparting a pseudo-ductile fracture behaviour to brittle matrices is achieved with continuous fibre reinforcement, including unidirectional and cross-ply fibre alignment, and 2-and 3-dimensional fibre architectures. The vast majority of work concerned with fibre reinforcement of glasses and glassceramics has focused on using ceramic fibres, such as carbon [2,3], SiC yarn (type Nicalon) [3][4][5][6], SiC monofilament [7], alumina/zirconia (Type PRD-166) [8], polycrystalline alumina [9], single crystal alumina (Saphikon) [8] and mullite (Nextel 480) [10]. The reinforcement of glass matrices by continuous ductile elements has been much less investigated, despite the advantages they may have over their ceramic counterparts.…”