Nacre, an iridescent material that lines some seashells, gains strength and toughness from its structure: brittle mineral chips glued into layers by squishy proteins. Now researchers have used the same principle to develop a superstrong glass composite that could one day make nearly unbreakable smartphone screens, windshields and other items that currently rely on various types of treated glass.
The new material combines rigid glass flakes, less than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, with flexible acrylic. “When we combine those two together, similar to nacre, we recover the best parts of both components,” says Allen Ehrlicher, a McGill University bioengineer and co-author of a new paper describing the composite, which was recently published in Science.
