Today we are going to look at the Gorilla glass-Its history and the reason behind its strength.
So the journey to Gorilla glass started at the Corning glass works- A Glass Industry where a chemist was carrying out his routine work of heating the glass at 600degrees to melt it but it so happened that the glass was overheated leading to the World's first glass ceramic material-a name assigned to this material owing to the fact that the material had the properties of both glass and ceramic-which was going to be the main ingredient of our smartphone screens.
The glass is itself an amorphous solid which lacks proper arrangement of molecules due to which whenever a stress is applied it cracks as there are no layers of properly arranged molecules in it to dismantle the stress.
The ceramic material, on the other hand, has some level of crystalline structure and stress applied on it can spread in the crystal structure, the brittleness here results only in case of excessive stress that is unbearable by the material otherwise as long as the stress is in the tolerance range, it does not break.
The glass-ceramic material accidentally formed at the Corning glass works was further investigated to find ways of making glass-ceramic materials and at last in 1962 the modern GORILLA GLASS was synthesized.
It is basically an alumino-silicate type of glass that originally contained sodium ions in its structure but through experimentation, it evolved that instead of sodium ions if Potassium ions are incorporated in the structure, the strength can be significantly enhanced.
This is due to the larger size of Potassium ions as compared to sodium ions. Larger ions in place of smaller ions, within the same dimensions, means the structure of the glass-ceramic material(Gorilla Glass) would be compressed to accommodate this bulkiness and that stores potential energy in the product giving it extra toughness.
Comments
Post a Comment