Every child knows that glass can be broken. But there may soon be panes that do not shatter into thousands of shards under load, but absorb the pressure. A new method makes glass malleable and therefore break resistant. The reason for the fragility of glass is that it usually mostly consist of silicon dioxide...
...This material is indeed hard but it is also very brittle. At McGill University in Canada, scientists have now found a way to change this property of glass. After processing with an ultraviolet laser, the material became much more elastic and could be easily deformed.
The scientists were inspired by a trick from nature. The mother of pearl shell is indeed made of brittle minerals, but is very robust. The surface structure of the shell is made up of many small separate layers, thus external forces are not applied only to a single point. With this construction principle, pressure applied to a point is spread and absorbed by the whole shell construction.
The idea of dividing the surface of the glass, analogous to the shell construction, led to success. In the future, the researchers are now thinking about testing this process on ceramics and plastics, so these also produce fewer shards in the future, but hopefully no less luck - because "shards bring luck"!
Source: PM Magazin
