In a nutshell: Researchers from Penn State have developed a brand new sort of glass that cuts its carbon footprint in half and is much extra sturdy. The creation, dubbed LionGlass, is known as after the varsity’s Nittany Lion mascot. The brand new glass eliminates using carbon-containing batch supplies, mentioned John Mauro, professor of supplies science and engineering at Penn State and lead researcher on the undertaking.
LionGlass additionally has a melting temperature that’s about 300 to 400 levels Celsius decrease than standard soda lime silicate glass, that means far much less power is required to warmth furnaces to soften it. In keeping with Mauro, the decrease melting level reduces power consumption by almost 30 p.c which in flip considerably cuts CO2 emissions. It may additionally prolong the lifetime of producing furnaces.
Mauro is aware of a factor or two about glass. Throughout his time at Corning, he helped invent / co-invent a number of sorts of industrial glass together with Gorilla Glass merchandise utilized in most trendy cell gadgets.
Penn State’s LionGlass can be a lot stronger than conventional glass. In testing, some compositions wouldn’t crack even underneath the utmost load attainable by their indention tools (a one kilogram-force load from a Vickers diamond indenter). For comparability, normal soda lime glass cracks underneath a load of round 0.1 kilograms power.
“We saved growing the burden on LionGlass till we reached the utmost load the tools will enable,” said Nick Clark, a postdoctoral fellow in Mauro’s lab. “It merely wouldn’t crack.”
Glass that’s much less prone to cracking could possibly be helpful throughout a spread of functions together with within the automotive, well being care, structure, electronics, and communications industries. LionGlass may additionally enable producers to cut back the thickness of glass, leading to lighter-weight merchandise with related ranges of harm resistance or equally thick merchandise with rather more sturdiness.
The researchers have already filed a patent for his or her creation as a primary step to industrial availability, and are actually within the means of exposing completely different compositions to numerous chemical substances to see how the glass reacts. Outcomes from these assessments will assist the crew higher perceive how LionGlass could possibly be utilized in the actual world.
Picture credit score: Tom Van Dyck
