Prince Rupert of Bavaria,
and King Charles the Second?
of all things these strange looking glass tadpoles, that have been fascinating scientists for over 400 years, they were a gift from Prince Rupert of Bavaria to King Charles the Second, the thing that makes them so special is that the large end will withstand the blow of a hammer,
and they are so strong they can even be shot at with a bullet and still suffer no side effects, sometimes even shattering the bullet!
but put pressure on the tail and and they will shatter, well, like glass into dust, in 1994, researchers used high-speed photography to record
and analyse the way the drops shatter, Lisa Zyga reports for Phys.org. They
concluded that the surface of the drop has high compressive stress while the
interior of the drops is under high tension, while that combo makes the head
very strong, it’s not in equilibrium, which means even a slight disruption at
the tail causes the whole thing to destabilising and fall apart, in fact, the
cracks move at 4,000 miles per hour, which pulverises the glass,
but it wasn’t until recent technological advances, however,
that could researchers examine the stress distribution in detail, they used a
transmission polariscope, a type of microscope to study the tensions within the
glass, by sending red LED light through the drop while it was submerged in a
clear liquid, they could measure how stresses in the drop slowed down the
light, giving them a rainbow-colored optical map of the forces within the drop,
using mathematical models they then calculated the various interior and
exterior forces, the researchers published their results last year in the journal
Applied Physics Letters, so finally the secret of Prince Rupert’s drops was known, amazing, and why is this so important? as Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo reports, learning
about the drops could lead to new types of shatterproof glass and, most
importantly, un-crackable cell phone screens.
No comments:
Post a Comment