If you have butter fingers, the first thing you'd look for while buying a phone is it's impact resistance. Unfortunately it's hard to find such a device that doesn't shatter into a million pieces soon as it hits the ground.?
The shock to the system is one thing, the shock to your wallet quite another. Now, if only there were a fix for that...
Reuters
Turns out there is. Imagine a type of glass that bends like plastic and is totally shatterproof. Getting most of their inspiration from seashells, that's exactly what these scientists did.
The new?glass is based on the resilience of seashells.
According to a story published in Discover Magazine, lead author of the study at McGill University in Canada, Francois Barthelat said, ¡°We can make a piece of glass that drastically deforms like a piece of plastic. It duplicates what we see in seashells."
In an oyster, you'll see the inside is made up of mother-of-pearl, a smooth substance that lines the inner shell of some molluscs, and it's this material that gave way to the invention of this new type of glass.
Tempered glass helps protect against minor bumps and dings. The material is compressed at its surface, which helps to prevent cracks from forming. When it does crack, however, the entire material fails and the glass explodes, explains the study in Discover Magazine.?
McGill University engineer Francois Barthelat, who led the new research, told The Daily Mail, "Animals take relatively weak ingredients - a brittle mineral, soft proteins - and turn them into a hard yet extremely tough armour."
The mother-of-pearl looks like it¡¯s made out of tiny building blocks. Under force, the mineral blocks can slide apart from each other. The sliding allows the material to take on substantial blows without breaking.
The researchers used laser to cut 'bricks' out of borosilicate glass sheets which were then laminated. They then aligned and arranged the sheets so that the final product mimicked the three-dimensional structure of mother-of-pearl, with a type of plastic (called ethylene-vinyl acetate) acting as the ¡°mortar.¡±
The new glass, thus produced is transparent, does not produce any image distortions and bends instead of breaking under stress, all the while being as strong as laminated glass.
¡°Instead of breaking catastrophically with many cracks and shards like regular glasses, our material is much tougher: It ¡®dents¡¯ and deforms instead of cracking,"Barthelat further added.
According to the scientists, materials made from the new glass would be used for windows panes, touchscreens, even foldable phones. So, no more tension about your phone falling and shattering into pieces.?