buffy said:

Sorry.

Piece I found interesting in SciAm today:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/seashells-inspire-new-superstrong-glass-composite/

buffy said:

buffy said:

Sorry.

Piece I found interesting in SciAm today:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/seashells-inspire-new-superstrong-glass-composite/

Ah, the key is transparency. Strong glass-plastic composites have been known ever since fibreglass was invented. The bulletproof shielding of the Apache helicopter is made of strong glass-plastic composite. So is GLARE, the composite material on the A380 Airbus.

But here they’re looking for transparency.

The new material combines rigid glass flakes, less than one hundredth of a millimeter thick, with flexible acrylic. When we combine those two together, similar to nacre, we recover the best parts of both components.

The parallel sides of the thin glass flakes minimise translucency, as does the refractive index matching. CSIRO has used this type of refractive index matching inside flows of fluids full of solid spheres to study multiphase flows.

A concern is the material added to the plastic that changes the refractive index. This can be corrosive and highly dangerous (it was in the CSIRO experiments). If done wrongly, the boundaries between the plastic and glass are sites for crack growth and rapid degradation.

Another minor concern is that the glass thickness results in internal reflections that selectively filter out certain frequencies of light. So whatever is used this would result in windows that are slightly tinted rather thar really clear.

> The result is not only transparent, Ehrlicher says, but also 400 percent stronger and 650 percent more damage-resistant than the material used in car windshields: resin sandwiched between two layers of glass.

Yes. It would be. And it wouldn’t be inordinately expensive either.