Corning Announces Gorilla Glass 4; Videos with the Mythbusters Included

[dgstorm]

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The above video is Corning's new announcement of their Gorilla Glass 4 technology. Corning claims their new Gorilla Glass variant is twice as strong as the previous gen Gorilla Glass 3, it and takes one stop closer to smartphone displays that won't break when you drop them.

According to their research and testing with Gorilla Glass 4, Corning claims their product survives drops from 3.3 feet up to 80% better than their competitors. On top of the humorous Gorilla video above designed to tease consumers, Corning also recently teamed up with the Mythbusters duo, Adam and Jamie.

The Mythbusters team threw their usual spin on educating while entertaining as they explain some of the history, technology and advancements in glass from Corning. The videos are illuminating while being enjoyable to watch and can be found in the thread below.

 

[dgstorm]

Here are those two Mythbusters & Corning team up videos:

 

[Jonny Kansas]

So, Corning's been making bada** glass forever and they've improved it again.

YES! AIR CANNON!

 

[TatDroid]

There was a LOT of discussion about Sapphire glass leading up to the iPhone 6 release, about how HARD it was, but hard (scratch resistant) does not necessarily correspond directory with STRONG (shatter resistant). As a matter of fact, the two can actually have an inverse relationship - the harder it gets the less shatter resistant it becomes. That was always a huge question mark and the source of discussion about Sapphire. I would MUCH rather have shatter resistance. A 99 cent screen protector can deal with scratches.

Corning is definitely going in the right direction, IMHO.

Sent from my Droid Turbo

 

[FoxKat]

There was a LOT of discussion about Sapphire glass leading up to the iPhone 6 release, about how HARD it was, but hard (scratch resistant) does not necessarily correspond directory with STRONG (shatter resistant). As a matter of fact, the two can actually have an inverse relationship - the harder it gets the less shatter resistant it becomes. That was always a huge question mark and the source of discussion about Sapphire. I would MUCH rather have shatter resistance. A 99 cent screen protector can deal with scratches.

Corning is definitely going in the right direction, IMHO.

Sent from my Droid Turbo

Couldn't have said it better myself. The fact is that Sapphire is more scratch resistant than regular glass and yet not shatter resistant, but it's also not anywhere near as flexible as either Gorilla Glass 1 or any of its later iterations. Of course, Gorilla Glass is approaching the scratch resistant qualities of sapphire while being far less expensive to manufacture and yet even still stronger.

It would be interesting to see if they could do chemical enhancement to sapphire similar to what they're doing with glass under the Gorilla Glass program. Then you could get the best quality of Sapphire incorporated with the best qualities of glass.

Any single pure substance is going to have its pros and cons. It's often through alloys or other hybrid versions of substances which are combined together that you benefit from an increased feature in one style while not losing another feature of another style.

A simple example of this would be plywood vs a sheet of sawn wood that's not in laminate. You gain the added strength of flexibility and greater weight capacity with plywood, simply by the fact that you take the best qualities of the regular wood and incorporate alternating directions of the grain and a thin layer of bonding material. The result is you get the added strength of the alternating directions of the grain, along with the greater flexibility and the lesser likelihood of cracking and splintering due to each layer of wood in the laminate being thinner and therefore more flexible.

In the case of alloys, iron vs steel in its various Marriott of capacities can be anything from extremely brittle and very strong to extremely flexible and very strong to extremely corrosion resistant vs highly corrosive. Most often this accomplished by blending iron with other metals such as nickel and chromium and other various elements. Some of the same qualities can be obtained by various heating and cooling processes somewhat similar to the one that was demonstrated in the video where the glass had its own internal high stress created by the various rates of cooling. In the steel world or in the metal world they call that tempering, and now of course we have tempered glass.

 

[xeene]

The sapphire glass that I saw from apple was very flexible and shatter proof but I believe also very expensive.

iPhone 6 Sapphire Crystal Display!:

 

[FoxKat]

It is not completely amazing or unexpected that the Sapphire didn't scratch with either the keys or (even more important) the hardened steel knife. The fact is that Sapphire is a 9 on the MOHS scale of hardness, second only to Diamond (at 10), in its hardness and resistance to scratching. So it's no real surprise that hardened steel, which is a 7.5 to 8 on the MOHS scale would not scratch a Sapphire Crystal screen. In fact, the Sapphire screen could actually scratch the Hardened Steel if he had taken the edge and dragged it over the knife's blade face. It would also be able to dull the knife's edge by dragging the Sapphire screen's edge right down the blade edge

Gorilla Glass, by the very nature of glass is far less hard and therefore susceptible to scratching, yet is far more flexible and so, less susceptible to breakage. Yes, that video seems to show Sapphire being quite flexible, but that's mainly due to its sheer thinness. The crystal itself is still more stiff and hard, and therefore more susceptible to breakage than even Gorilla Glass 3.

In the image below, equivalent thicknesses of Sapphire glass and Gorilla Glass 3 were put to the test for strength. first, each was abraded (scratched) in an identical fashion. Then each was placed in a metered pressure test. In the end, the Sapphire failed at just over 160 pounds per square inch of pressure, whereas the Gorilla Glass withstood nearly 3 times the pressure, taking a whopping 436 pounds per square inch before the test was ended when it failed.

The best of both worlds could possibly come from an ultra-thin layer of Sapphire over another ultra-thin layer of Gorilla Glass 3 (or 4). Then the two combined would retain the best qualities of each while not also suffering from the worst aspects of each. Another possibility is that perhaps Sapphire could be coaxed to grow in its natural crystalline structure right onto the Gorilla Glass, making it essentially chemically bonded. This would truly innovate the screens we now use, but this is purely hypothetical and there may be very basic scientific reasons why they can't accomplish such (at least with present technologies).

 

[Ollie]

6 reasons that Apple's iPhone 6 sapphire screens never happened.

 

[Netforza]

Regarding the second Myth Busters video, why not use Gorilla Glass on both layers of the wind shield?

 

[Jonny Kansas]

Fascinating stuff guys. FoxKat must have the MOHS scale memorized. He's always quoting it.

As Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad would say, "Science B****!"

 

[Ollie]

Fascinating stuff guys. FoxKat must have the MOHS scale memorized. He's always quoting it.

As Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad would say, "Science B****!"

I'm thinking it's that tattoo he is always hiding from us.

 

[Narsil]

Regarding the second Myth Busters video, why not use Gorilla Glass on both layers of the wind shield?

I'm guessing sheer cost. Laminating the GG to the soda lime glass provides a balance between pure performance (and weight) versus cost.

 

[Jonny Kansas]

Still, you gotta figure that, even though it may save your life, if you've only got the GG on one side and the outside still cracks, you'll be replacing your windshield anyway...

 

[Netforza]

That is exactly what I was thinking about.

 

[TatDroid]

I remember reading somewhere in the discovery portion of the chapter 11 filing for GT Advanced Technologies that in an early pre-production test run for iPhone screens something like 600 pounds of glass was produced, and not one ounce was usable.

Sent from my Droid Turbo