In Nature Scientific Reports, the boffins from the University of Tokyo and Japan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute describe their oxide glass, which they reckon will also be useful in buildings and cars. Can you imagine a glass as hard as steel on your smartphone?
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The substance is strengthened by adding aluminium oxide to silicon dioxide, a process that is hard to effect using conventional techniques because the compound crystallises when it makes contact with another solid, and this prevents glass from forming in the normal way.
The scientists bypassed this problem by using a containerless processing technique.
Others have tried this before, but as soon as they added the alumina to the silicon dixoide inside a container, the mixture crystallized and glass didn’t form. From there, the glass was colorless, transparent, super touch, with 50% of it being composed of alumina. The modulus of the new glass, the indicator of rigidity, was twice as high compared to typical oxide glass and almost the same level as steel and iron.
However, it’s not a wonder material: what those tests measure is the ability of a material, in this case the glass, to resist indentation by another object.
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The hardened glass used on devices like smartphones and tablets got that way with the addition of aluminum oxide during the production process. The team reports that, in toying around with samples of the material and applying every force they could think of on them, they discovered they could generate radial cracks that propagate from a central point throughout the material – while being very very tough, in a few respects it performs and behaves just as regular heavy duty industrial glass. Virtually unsearchable smartphone screens and bouncy beer bottles?
