Glass Class
Uncommon knowledge about an extraordinary material
Fact 01
While many elements and compounds can form glasses, nearly all conventional glasses (in fact, all glasses that you have likely encountered) are based upon one of the most versatile chemical families: the silicates — i.e. materials based upon SiO2.
Fact 03
Glass objects are among the oldest man-made materials, perhaps dating before 3400 B.C. Moreover, natural glass objects are among the oldest found in the solar system. Scientists found tiny silica glass spheres in lunar soil brought back by Apollo astronauts that were three billion years old.
Fact 04
The ultimate theoretical strength of glass exceeds the herculean level of 10 Gigapascals (GPa), a level few crystalline materials can achieve. Simply said, glass can take a hit.
WHAT IS THE
THEORETICAL LIMIT OF GLASS STRENGTH?
Let's bring in a friend to help us explain
It would take a stack of about 10,000 elephants to produce just 1GPa of pressure under each of the four feet of the bottom elephant.
Glass can withstand 10 times
that pressure!
Fact 06
Obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic silicate glass, has been used by man since the Stone Age because of its ability to be fractured to create a super-sharp cutting tool. Obsidian is still used today in specialty surgical blades that have a cutting edge many times sharper than highest-quality steel surgical scalpels. The cutting edge of an engineered obsidian blade is only about three nanometers thick and much smoother than the finest sharpened surgical steel.
Surgical Blade (Steel)
Obsidian Blade
Fact 07
Although silicon and oxygen are the predominant constituents of glass, silica is also a gracious collaborator with its friends on the periodic table. A survey of glass research reveals more than 50 other elements that have been used as additives to silica glass in order to create glasses with unique physical, thermal, or optical properties for a wide variety of technical and artistic applications.
Fact 09
Glass is one of the most transparent materials known to man. Glass used in optical fiber has 30X the transparency of the purest water, and only about 1% less transmittance than air on a clear day. An optical fiber's capability to transmit digital optical signals undistorted over great distance has made it the foundation of our information society.
A single modern optical fiber can carry 10Tb/s (10 trillion bits of information per second) over a kilometer — i.e., enough information to fill 250 DVDs every second.
To transmit this same amount of information by electrical means, you would need almost 400,000 standard twisted copper wire pairs, that's 880 tons of copper!
Fact 10
One of the most ubiquitous high-tech glasses is the LCD substrate. In 2012, the LCD industry is expected to require 3.6 billion square feet of glass — enough to cover the entire length of Interstate 90 from Boston to Seattle with a ribbon of glass four lanes wide, including a generous allowance for shoulders and median.
Introduction
"If you think glass is weak, think again... glass is used for the space shuttle's windows, for
covering the tallest skyscrapers, in optical fiber cable buried in trenches under the
ocean, and for bullet proof windows in combat vehicles. Glass has been designed into the most
hostile environments known... as a re-entry heat shield for Apollo space capsules, to store
the most reactive and noxious chemicals, as observation windows near the hot zones of
nuclear reactors, and as a hull for a submarine under development to reach the bottom of the
Mariana Trench. Why is it that glass fiber is used to reinforce engineering polymers and
concrete, but never the other way around? Hmmm?
Glass is anything but weak."
Dr. Peter Bocko
