News story by Aryaa Sinha
Canada, Oct 12: Researchers at McGill University have designed a new type of glass that is said to be 5 times more resistant to fracture than standard glass. This tougher and stronger glass is inspired by the inner layer of mollusk shells called Nacre or mother of pearl. Mollusk is any animal that has a soft body and is often covered with shell, for example snail, octopus etc. And Nacre is a smooth, hard substance forming the inner
layer of these shells. Mollusk shells are made up of 95% of chalk, which is very delicate in its pure form.
However, Nacre is made up of microscopic tablets. The combination of such materials made this new kind of glass extremely strong. Researchers replicated the architecture of Nacre with layers of glass flakes and acrylic making it exceptionally strong and opaque. To make this composite optically transparent they tuned the refractive index of acrylic so that it blends with the glass (Refractive index is the measure of bending of ray of light while passing from one medium to another). This could be used to improve cell phone display and many other devices.
