3 ms·
Am I being overly cynical when I interpret: “We will establish a way to mass-produce the new material shortly ... We are looking to commercialize the technique
by mvgoogler 11y ago
Am I being overly cynical when I interpret: “We will establish a way to mass-produce the new material shortly ... We are looking to commercialize the technique within five years.” as "We have no clue how to mass-produce this but hope we can figure it out in five years if someone gives us money"?
It's hard to imagine how a gas-based "containerless processing system" will lend itself to producing the thin, uniform sheets of glass for windows or complex shapes like tableware.
It's a cool prototype, but figuring out how to produce at scale is often the hard part.
- wycx 11y agoIndeed. A method of making glass via a containerless processing system that I am aware of, is aerodynamic levitation, wherein a ball of starting material is suspended in a stream of gas, such as Ar, and heated by lasers. This method is used in systems that tend to crystallise rapidly rather than quench to a nice glass, since the thermal mass of the sample is very small and you can take all the heat away instantly by tunring off the laser. Samples prepared by such a method are typically 100s to 1000s of microns in diameter. I would be very interested to hear how they would scale this method to industrial production, if aerodynamic levitation is how they made their glass.