Isn't that what they call "victim blaming" these days?
Alumina in glass could stop smartphones cracking up
Trekkies will remember how Scotty bestowed transparent aluminium on the world in Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home. Now Japanese researchers have added alumina to glass to try and make it tough enough for the hard life of the smartphone. In Nature Scientific Reports, the boffins from the University of Tokyo and Japan's Synchrotron …
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 13:30 GMT Lord Raa
@James Micallef
I am of the same opinion, however, my travels through the intertubes has led me to believe that a great many people believe that asking people to take personal responsibility is the same thing as victim blaming.
It's part of the "my feelings are more important than the facts" attitude that some people have these days.
Looking back, I should have used the troll icon.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 08:35 GMT MAF
Ultimate test
Given the price of some phones - you'd think people would take better care of their shiny-shinies - wouldn't you?
But some people have that interesting additional property - small children :-)
Any phone manufacturer worth their salt would be well advised to hire some of these little darlings for product destruction testing (Forget 'will it blend?')
Also, with insurance deals protecting their bubble, 'accidents' give people an opportunity (cough) for a hardware upgrade...
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 09:35 GMT Known Hero
Re: Ultimate test
I have 3 children all boys under 8, and a Evil cat.
I also have 4 phones in the house and 3 tablets.
The only broken screens can be attributed to my wife on numerable occasions, she has broken at least 4 phones & lost 2. The children and I have never broken a phonescreen yet. the cat is responsible for 1 broken screen.
I blame people being careless, the devices themselves are pretty good if you treat them with the relevant care.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 09:40 GMT Paul Crawford
Re: Ultimate test
Most of the broken phones I know of were folk who didn't put them in a cover. Perhaps images is more important than risk looking like and old fart, but this old fart has not broken a phone glass in the last 15 years in spite of several drops due to having them in a
gimp maskleather-effect cover.Oh yes, and the recent rend of having the glass right to the edge is not helping either, as less of the phone body to absorb the impact on a corner impact.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 12:05 GMT Sykobee
Re: Ultimate test
I think there's something about handbags and mobile phones that leads to them breaking.
Men stick 'em in their pockets where they're safe (well, front pockets are safe). Women stick them in the great tardis void of their handbag, so it's not a surprise when other hard things in the bag damage it.
However I used to see a lot of cracked screens in the past on my commutes, but the last year or two they have been far less common (and often have working screens under the cracked glass), so I presume a combination of more advanced gorilla glass, better cases, more flexible LCD arrays, etc, have all improved things.
I have cracked the screen on one phone, ironically in my front pocket at the time, when bending over in a non-health-and-safety-advised-manner to pick up something. That a toddler dropped.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 15:06 GMT cray74
Re: Ultimate test
"Men stick 'em in their pockets where they're safe (well, front pockets are safe). "
I just killed my Droid 4 in a front pocket. It didn't crack the screen, but the screen stopped working except when wiggled and moved into exactly the correct half-open position, and then that stopped working. I'm guessing I damaged the sliding contacts.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 09:49 GMT Triggerfish
I don't really take much care of mine tbh, it has to go in my pocket and cope with my lifestyle. I really hate having delicate bits of shiny that I have to spend my day worrying about. My last phone had dents in the casing, couple of years back with first smartphone and being abroad it really annoyed me that I had to keep thinking about it and whether it was ok.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 09:10 GMT Mage
Yes Transparent Alumina = Sapphire
Been used for analogue watches for a very long time indeed. Problematic to make larger windows. Also while it's very hard so scratch resistant, a panel of it is easier to crack than some glasses.
It's interesting they have found a way to blend Alumina and glass. I'd have thought an alumina film on glass substrate (meta material) would be better.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 10:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Young's modulus
The easiest way to measure the stiffness might well be to use ultrasound to measure the speed of sound in the sphere, and calculate the modulus from that and it's density. (Density should be known or very easy to work out.)
Sticking it in a conventional test machine means you have to figure out the differing components of tensile, compressive and bearing stress which will all occur in different regions when you compress the sphere. And then you have to separate out the effect of trying to create a dimple in the test machine bed when you compress a 2mm sphere into it.
Of more concern is that these spheres are almost certainly pre-stressed due to the way they are manufactured and a flat sheet might well have a completely different strength and a slightly different modulus. (The modulus is not always linear with applied stress.)
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 20:44 GMT Pookietoo
Re: these spheres are almost certainly pre-stressed
A particular type of pre-stressed glass spheres on Wikipedia and YouTube.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 13:26 GMT phy445
It may be stiff enough (snigger)...
But how tough is it? Glass is more than strong enough. The problem is dissipating the energy that gets dumped into the glass when your phone hits the floor (or dog bites it etc.) The paper linked in the report makes no mention of toughness. I suspect this story has been stretched to its limits by a university press office that cares more for getting more inches (more sniggering) in the press than reasonable reporting – an increasingly common problem as universities around the world have to fight for recognition/funding
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 13:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It may be stiff enough (snigger)...
I don't know if you really have to go into toughness, given that glass (especially thin glass) is historically brittle, meaning the given goal of this project is to make it tougher, more plastic, and therefore less brittle, while at the same time maintaining the transparency we come to expect from the screen.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 15:35 GMT cray74
Re: It may be stiff enough (snigger)...
I don't know if you really have to go into toughness,
"Fracture toughness" is a useful, formal measurement of crack resistance in a material, valued in odd units like Pa*sqrt(m) or psi*sqrt(in). It is often referred to as simply "toughness" when discussing materials properties, such as when phy445 is reviewing the materials paper behind this El Reg article to find out if the researchers were successful in making the glass "tougher, more plastic, and therefore less brittle."
It would be interesting to see some quantitative fracture toughness results from this project, but I guess they aren't at the point of making specimens large enough for Charpy and Izod testing. I just had an iPad-sized plate of alumina crack during testing that shouldn't have stressed the window much at all, so a tougher (and cheaper) alternative to large boule-grown sapphire would be nice.
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Thursday 5th November 2015 00:28 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: It may be stiff enough (snigger)...
Hey! Those Nokias were DANGEROUS!
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 14:10 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
Silica
I am pretty sure that high silica glass has always been a product. It being made of silicon and oxygen the other half of the product would have been aluminium wouldn't it -or must I look it all up again?
I gather they used some sort of ruby effect on early production supermarket tills to help them cope with wear and tear, how am I going to find out more about that?
I am pretty sure shaping a search will be a difficulty.
I think the cheaper glasses were produced by adding sodium and other metals such as lead to the matrix because it had the effect of lowering the melting point. Several decades ago Toyota or some Japanese firm began experimenting with vitreous enamels looking to make an engine that ran at very high temperatures.
Does it seem that they finally got there?
Jimmy Clark's son will be pleased.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 16:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Aluminum Oxide isn't anything new and is basically artificial sapphire. Boules have been manufactured since the late 1800's. The military use it for bullet-proof glass. Apple uses it for their 'button'. As for a screen I used to think it'd be very cool... but, although it is strong, it does not flex as well as Gorilla Glass.... so it does have some disadvantages. It does have a better dielectric constant so it is better for capacitive touch. Very hard to manufacture and cut. Process takes a long time and lots of energy. So more expensive.
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Wednesday 4th November 2015 16:53 GMT jlabute
Old News
Aluminum Oxide has been around since the late 1800's. Artificial Sapphire is difficult to manufacture. Takes a lot of time and energy to create the boule and cut it. Although it sounds cool, it is not as flexible as Gorilla Glass so it has some disadvantages other than being more expensive. The military use it for bullet proof windows. Apple uses it for their touch 'button'. Sapphire has a higher dielectric constant so it is better for capacitive touch technologies.