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Technology and Health News > Wednesday, July-02-2008

Through the glass



It was finally demonstrated how atoms arrange themselves inside the materials. This opens new possibilities for designing ultraresistant objects.

Glass is a material called 'amorphous', whose atoms that is, are not disposed in a regular type structures crystal. The substance is not considered a solid but, rather, a liquid with very high viscosity. An international research team, led by Paddy Royall University of Bristol (Great Britain), in collaboration with Japanese and Australian scholars, is now able to demonstrate that during the solidification particles have in-shaped structures that prevent the icosahedron formation of crystals. Unlike solid crystalline form, in which the atoms are fixed to one another by chemical bonds into regular geometric structures, glass appears' solid 'just because the movement of each particle is physically prevented by the presence of other neighbouring atoms. The particles, that is, hinder each other. It was thus finally confirmed, with a simulation test, a 50 years old theory that explains many of the characteristics of this material and that could allow us to build, for example, non-crystalline metals much more resistant than traditional ones.



The main obstacle to understanding the internal structure of glass was our inability to observe structures so small with microscopes. The research, published in Nature Materials, was conducted using special particles in a state of suspension that mimics the behavior of atoms, but they are big enough to be observed during the solidification.

According to researchers, on the basis of this discovery we can now expect to build innovative materials made of metals that mimic the structure of glass, less subject to fracture. The metals during the solidification tend to crystallize, thus presenting points of rupture between a crystal and another. If this were to build a metal with a structure similar to that of glass we would produce a material more resistant to both.

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