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Glass In Spaaaaace

Posted by Zonk on from the microgravity-for-macrogains dept.

AnKsT wrote to mention an article on NASA's site about creating and manipulating glass in space. From the article: "In microgravity...you don't need a container. In Day's initial experiments, the melt--a molten droplet about 1/4 inch in diameter--was held in place inside a hot furnace simply by the pressure of sound waves emitted by an acoustic levitator. With that acoustic levitator, explains Day, 'we could melt and cool and melt and cool a molten droplet without letting it touch anything.' As Day had hoped, containerless processing produced a better glass. To his surprise, though, the glass was of even higher quality than theory had predicted."

3 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Serious topic by Quentusrex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Only a few serious answers so far, but do you realize how important this kind of work could be? He has proven a concept. Now it is much more likely for a corperation to invest in space stations to build their products. I'm not saying it'll happen within the next year, but that is it closer. Now corperations will feel the investment is less risky with much more payoff. Can you imagine having your CPU made with the parts so much more pure then they are now? Engineers could build smaller chips because they wouldn't have to account for the impurities that naturally come in the materials.

  2. Re:purity by myowntrueself · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "because it is RESISTANT to crystallization under such conditions"

    Heres a thought.

    Will this sort of effect be important in hibernation and cryogenic storage of human beings?

    Think about it like this, we develop a way to freeze people and thaw them out, test it for a few years here on Earth, deploy the system for space trials and find that the human body reacts quite differently to crystalisation under microgravity.

    --
    In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
  3. Re:what a cliche by cagle_.25 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In the I, Robot stories, robots were most emphatically designed not to be weapons. Your rules would allow robot weaponry.

    I'm not so sure that I, Robot portrays the rules as a "bad idea" but rather a source of inconsistency -- and therefore a source of great story material.

    --
    Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.