• givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    3 times as tough as steel and they’re making bulletproof glass out of it…

    There’s a low budget pc game about colonizing Mars and this was one of the things in the tech tree

    Crazy to see it as a real thing now.

    Like OG aluminum, this is going to be crazy expensive at first, but in a century it’ll likely be cheap and we’ll see it replacing glass in the most mundane uses.

    We’ll see it replace phone screens pretty quickly tho. A few mm’s of this and we’ll have legitimately unbreakable screens, and even if a scratch happens, you should be able to just buff it out. They’re probably wrap entire phones it honestly. One solid piece that makes repair impossible on your own.

    • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Might be hard to assemble the functional part of a phone inside of a crystal, and you can’t bake the whole thing because silicon isn’t surviving 2000oC for 2 days.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, but it was a lot harder to make regular aluminum back in the day as well.

        Increasing ductility isn’t impossible, but it probably is unlikely in this case.

        But two halves that get glued/sealed together permanently would be possible.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Like OG aluminum, this is going to be crazy expensive at first, but in a century it’ll likely be cheap and we’ll see it replacing glass in the most mundane uses.

      I doubt that it’s ever going to be super affordable, or be used in something as common as a phone. The price constraints on aluminum were due to the amount of energy it takes to produce. The transparent aluminum is a bit more complicated.

      From the article it appears the fabrication is mold dependent, which always increases production cost. So you have to fabricate a mold for any new component. You then have to then pressurize the powder at 15k pounds per square inch, and then heat aluminum powders at 2000 degrees Celsius for 2 days.