It is the second hardest material in the world and the industry is seriously use it to make smart phones that will not break or scratch
Do you have an iPhone 5? If so, take a look at the glass covering the camera lens: are you looking at a sapphire crystal.
To be exact, which is seeing is an artificial sapphire, a material used by the military as transparent armor and armored vehicles also used laser devices.
This type of glass is still very expensive to manufacture in bulk, but as their production becomes cheaper, the technology industry poses use in smart phones and tablets, to avoid scratching and break as easily as those of today.
HARDER THAN A “GORILLA”
The synthetic sapphire has interesting properties. First, is a gemstone of the corundum family, the second hardest material after diamond world. It is also very clear and its hardness allows carve in thin glass sheets.
That’s why industry experts predict that the sapphire crystal glass could replace the Gorilla (a mixture of conventional glass to make it more resistant potassium) used in much of the touchscreen technology we use today.
As recently noted Kevin Bullis, publisher of the MIT Technology Review Masachussetts Institute, artificial sapphires “could become cheap enough to replace glass shades covering the phones.”
Bullis said that although the difference in price between the two options is still substantial, $ 3 screen Gorilla Glass compared to the $ 30 it costs to screen Sapphire is expected that the cost of the last to fall below U.S. $ 20 in the next couple of years.
“I’m sure someone will start to test the water and make a luxury smarphone using sapphire in 2013,” he predicted.
Synthetic Stones
Manufacturing synthetic stones like sapphire has been possible since 1902, thanks to a technique known as Verneuil, in honor of its inventor, the French chemist Auguste Verneuil.
This technique, which has evolved a lot since then, was the beginning of manufacturing synthetic stones, especially rubies and sapphires, which are manufactured mostly in countries like the U.S. and Russia.
Today, synthetic sapphire is increasingly appreciated in technology and research centers working on how to develop, cheaply, sapphire plates with the thickness of a human hair.
For manufacture, aluminum oxide is melted in a special furnace and then allowed to cool slowly to form a large crystal, which is cut with diamond-coated cable.
Lowering costs
GT mentioned Bullis Advanced Technologies in the United States as one of the companies currently engaged in the production of synthetic sapphire and in the design of special furnaces to produce larger crystals.
He says its executives believe that this work will provide the industry with sapphire crystals costing only three or four times that of the Gorilla glass.
Other companies in Russia and South Korea will also be working on the production of sapphire.
There may be a while until the sapphire comes to our phones, but it seems that very soon this gemstone will articulate our technology somehow.
