It's three times stronger than conventional glass, with five times the fracture resistance.
Making glass stronger through copying nature
Currently, the only way to make glass stronger is to temper or laminate it. While this can reinforce the glass, the process are costly and do not provide any additional structural strength once damaged. “Until now there were trade-offs between high strength, toughness, and transparency.
“Nature is a master of design. Studying the structure of biological materials and understanding how they work offers inspiration, and sometimes blueprints, for new materials,” explains Ehrlicher.“Amazingly, nacre has the rigidity of a stiff material and durability of a soft material, giving it the best of both worlds,” Ehrlicher continues.
“It’s made of stiff pieces of chalk-like matter that are layered with soft proteins that are highly elastic. This structure produces exceptional strength, making it 3000 times tougher than the materials that compose it,” he adds., researchers were able to replicate it in glass using glass flakes and acrylic.
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