January 30, 2014 — Engineers have borrowed a technique from shellfish to build a pre-stressed form of glass that can bend rather than break.
As anyone who has dropped their phone from a height knows, glass has a tendency to fracture when struck. But boffins at McGill University's department of mechanical engineering have developed a new form of glass that is pre-cracked by lasers, with the resulting tiny fissures being filled with polyurethane to make the substance capable of bending on impact.
"What we know now is that we can toughen glass, or other materials, by using patterns of micro-cracks to guide larger cracks, and in the process absorb the energy from an impact," said Professor François Barthelat.
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