Transparent Aluminum is now actually real

lordgyor · March 2019

https://youtu.be/DduO1fNzV4w

Someday it could be cheap enough to use for glasses and Smartphone screens. Imagine smartphone screens that need no protection, that never scratch, even if you shot the screen!

where2r1 · March 2019

Oh my god....THIS is freakin' cool!!!!

From my fav Star Trek movie, too.

Before I die...I am going to get a pair of sunglasses made from this stuff. :::::cross fingers:::::

lordgyor · March 2019

> @where2r1 said:
> Oh my god....THIS is freakin' cool!!!!
>
> From my fav Star Trek movie, too.

>
> Before I die...I am going to get a pair of sunglasses made from this stuff. :::::cross fingers:::::

I'm more excited to have a smart phone screen made of this stuff.

starkaos · March 2019

Doubt it would be good for car windshields due to accident victims slamming head first into it.

angrytarg · March 2019

You dropped an "i" there

starkaos · March 2019

angrytarg wrote: »

You dropped an "i" there

It depends on if you are American or British. Americans use Aluminum while British use Aluminium. Besides it is called Transparent Aluminum in the movie so Transparent Aluminum is the correct pronunciation not Transparent Aluminium.

saurializard · March 2019

starkaos wrote: »

angrytarg wrote: »

You dropped an "i" there

Americans use Aluminum while British and every other country in the world use Aluminium.

Fixed that a bit.

BTW, would you US and Canadian folks please stop not doing what most of the rest of the world does or writes? That's a bit awkward and this is why aliens don't visit us.

artan42 · March 2019

starkaos wrote: »

angrytarg wrote: »

You dropped an "i" there

It depends on if you are American or British. Americans use Aluminum while British use Aluminium. Besides it is called Transparent Aluminum in the movie so Transparent Aluminum is the correct pronunciation not Transparent Aluminium.

That's a quirk of the Universal Translator. So Scott would ever pronounce it incorrectly without the 'I' as dictated by the IUPAC.

starkaos · March 2019

saurializard wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

angrytarg wrote: »

You dropped an "i" there

Americans use Aluminum while British and every other country in the world use Aluminium.

Fixed that a bit.

BTW, would you US and Canadian folks please stop not doing what most of the rest of the world does or writes? That's a bit awkward and this is why aliens don't visit us.

Americans and Canadians use Aluminum. The Chinese word for aluminum is li and there is likely other countries that have their own word for it. So it is not the British and every other country in the world uses Aluminium.

saurializard · March 2019

starkaos wrote: »

saurializard wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

angrytarg wrote: »

You dropped an "i" there

Americans use Aluminum while British and every other country in the world use Aluminium.

Fixed that a bit.

BTW, would you US and Canadian folks please stop not doing what most of the rest of the world does or writes? That's a bit awkward and this is why aliens don't visit us.

Americans and Canadians use Aluminum. The Chinese word for aluminum is li and there is likely other countries that have their own word for it. So it is not the British and every other country in the world uses Aluminium.

I admit, it's true it's only with a 'i' in Afrikaans, Arabic, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kapampangan, Kazakh, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sicilian, Spanish, Swahili, Slovene, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Yiddish, Yoruba.

That was a joke! Even if it's still correct for the most part.

angrytarg · March 2019

It is true since the word itself is latim, and the suffix "-ium" is to define metals. You can't just remove the "i" because it changes the meaning of the word 😂

tunebreaker · March 2019

saurializard wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

saurializard wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

angrytarg wrote: »

You dropped an "i" there

Americans use Aluminum while British and every other country in the world use Aluminium.

Fixed that a bit.

BTW, would you US and Canadian folks please stop not doing what most of the rest of the world does or writes? That's a bit awkward and this is why aliens don't visit us.

Americans and Canadians use Aluminum. The Chinese word for aluminum is li and there is likely other countries that have their own word for it. So it is not the British and every other country in the world uses Aluminium.

I admit, it's true it's only with a 'i' in Afrikaans, Arabic, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kapampangan, Kazakh, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sicilian, Spanish, Swahili, Slovene, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Yiddish, Yoruba.

That was a joke! Even if it's still correct for the most part.

It's not "aluminium" in Estonian, nor in Finnish, and I don't think in Latvian and Lithuanian either, although I don't care enough to check. And some of the languages you mentioned don't use the Latin alphabet in the first place.

jonsills · March 2019

As an American, this sort of discussion actually gives me a small degree of comfort. It's nice to see that we're not always the ones insisting imperialistically that the rest of the world conform to our own peculiarities.

lordgyor · March 2019

> @jonsills said:
> As an American, this sort of discussion actually gives me a small degree of comfort. It's nice to see that we're not always the ones insisting imperialistically that the rest of the world conform to our own peculiarities.

No , your just the ones mostly to do so at the end of a gun.

starkaos · March 2019

angrytarg wrote: »

It is true since the word itself is latim, and the suffix "-ium" is to define metals. You can't just remove the "i" because it changes the meaning of the word 😂

Then why is there no such thing as Goldium, Silverium, Copperium, Tinnium, Leadium, etc. The original discoverer originally called it alumium. Besides Aluminum sounds better than Aluminium. It was Transparent Aluminum in Star Trek 4 so it should be Transparent Aluminum.

artan42 · March 2019

starkaos wrote: »

angrytarg wrote: »

It is true since the word itself is latim, and the suffix "-ium" is to define metals. You can't just remove the "i" because it changes the meaning of the word 😂

Then why is there no such thing as Goldium, Silverium, Copperium, Tinnium, Leadium, etc. The original discoverer originally called it alumium. Besides Aluminum sounds better than Aluminium. It was Transparent Aluminum in Star Trek 4 so it should be Transparent Aluminum.

The original discoverers of tungsten called it wolfram. Where's your consistency? Also wolfram sounds better than tungsten.

And you've no idea how it's spelt as Scotty is universally translated and not subtitled like a Klingon.

jonsills wrote: »

As an American, this sort of discussion actually gives me a small degree of comfort. It's nice to see that we're not always the ones insisting imperialistically that the rest of the world conform to our own peculiarities.

The IUPAC contains Americans. In return for you having to correctly spell and pronounce 'Al' and 'Cs' everyone else has to misspell 'S' and most Europeans have to call 'W' tungsten despite it being represented by a 'W'.

starkaos · March 2019

artan42 wrote: »

starkaos wrote: »

angrytarg wrote: »

It is true since the word itself is latim, and the suffix "-ium" is to define metals. You can't just remove the "i" because it changes the meaning of the word 😂

Then why is there no such thing as Goldium, Silverium, Copperium, Tinnium, Leadium, etc. The original discoverer originally called it alumium. Besides Aluminum sounds better than Aluminium. It was Transparent Aluminum in Star Trek 4 so it should be Transparent Aluminum.

The original discoverers of tungsten called it wolfram. Where's your consistency? Also wolfram sounds better than tungsten.

And you've no idea how it's spelt as Scotty is universally translated and not subtitled like a Klingon.

Either every metal should have -ium at the end of the name or it should be named by the discoverer of the element. There is no consistency in the Periodic Table of Elements. Tungsten and Wolfram is slightly more complicated since Tungsten came from Scheelite which is also known as tung sten with the English translation being heavy stone. Wolfram comes from Wolframite. So different European countries have different names for it based on which mineral they used. It might be a compromise for why the chemical symbol for Tungsten is W.

Actually we do know how it is spelled since it says Transparent Aluminum on the screen of the old Macintosh computer in Star Trek 4 so it doesn't matter if it wasn't subtitled.

wombat140 · March 2019

The point is there aren't any other metals that end in um without ending in ium. Unless you can think of one. Incidentally, there are original Latin words for the metals you mentioned, which are the sources of their chemical abbreviations, and four of those DO have ums that aren't iums - Aurum, Argentum, Cuprum, Stibium and Plumbum. I wonder what the rule in Latin actually is? All the same, none of the actual scientific names of other elements, as used now rather than in Ancient Rome, have an um without an ium. Americans don't say cadmum or uranum.

And which sounds better is presumably a question of what you're used to, because to me (UK) "aluminium" sounds obviously better than "aluminum". Incidentally, where do you lot actually put the emphasis in "aluminum"? I'd have assumed "al-you-MIN-um", but I could be wrong. Woody Guthrie says "a-LOO-min-um", but then he's Woody Guthrie.

What they called it in Star Trek 4 is, obviously, a translation into 20th-century American English for the viewers' benefit; by the 23rd century everyone uses the Tellarite spelling, because "transparent aluminium" takes a lot longer to type than "zott". :-)

hawkeyenfo117 · March 2019

Back to the original subject, what the video is describing is Aluminum oxynitride or "ALON". It's technically not transparent metal, as it is a ceramic material. A metal in the conventional sense is shiny but opaque in most cases (unless it is REALLY thin like gold leaf or some other unusual situations) because the free electrons in the metallic bonds don't really work with the whole light transmission thing.

As far as using it in a car windshield, the seat belts should be keeping you from hitting the windshield in an accident.

Whether it is feasible to use in a consumer automotive application would be dependent partly on how it behaves on impact. Car windows are made of tempered glass so that they shatter into tiny bits when breaking, rather than large shards that would have much bigger cutting edges. The front windshield is made of a laminate (usually 2 glass layers with a plastic layer in the middle) that is designed to hold the windshield together in mostly one piece even if the glass layers shatter. It is possible that an ALON windshield would reduce the probability of breakage in the first place or improve protection of the occupants from debris that would penetrate a conventional windshield, but people would need to conduct experiments to quantify that.

Unknown · March 2019

This content has been removed.

markhawkman · March 2019

hawkeyenfo117 wrote: »

Back to the original subject, what the video is describing is Aluminum oxynitride or "ALON". It's technically not transparent metal, as it is a ceramic material. A metal in the conventional sense is shiny but opaque in most cases (unless it is REALLY thin like gold leaf or some other unusual situations) because the free electrons in the metallic bonds don't really work with the whole light transmission thing.

As far as using it in a car windshield, the seat belts should be keeping you from hitting the windshield in an accident. Whether it is feasible to use in a consumer automotive application would be dependent partly on how it behaves on impact. Car windows are made of tempered glass so that they shatter into tiny bits when breaking, rather than large shards that would have much bigger cutting edges. The front windshield is made of a laminate (usually 2 glass layers with a plastic layer in the middle) that is designed to hold the windshield together in mostly one piece even if the glass layers shatter. It is possible that an ALON windshield would reduce the probability of breakage in the first place or improve protection of the occupants from debris that would penetrate a conventional windshield, but people would need to conduct experiments to quantify that.

Also AlON was first used over 10 years ago. It's basically clear, synthetic Sapphire. AlON has also been used for bullet-resistant glass for years. Since it's chemically similar to Sapphire, but purer, it's actually hard enough you almost need a Diamond tipped instrument to scratch it.

Last I heard the stuff was SUPER-expensive. Mainly because you can't melt/pour it. It's shaped via "sintering" in which you powder it, then fill a mold with powder and heat the power until it starts to soften a little bit. This doesn't require anywhere near as much heat as full melting.

starkaos · March 2019

markhawkman wrote: »

hawkeyenfo117 wrote: »

Back to the original subject, what the video is describing is Aluminum oxynitride or "ALON". It's technically not transparent metal, as it is a ceramic material. A metal in the conventional sense is shiny but opaque in most cases (unless it is REALLY thin like gold leaf or some other unusual situations) because the free electrons in the metallic bonds don't really work with the whole light transmission thing.

As far as using it in a car windshield, the seat belts should be keeping you from hitting the windshield in an accident. Whether it is feasible to use in a consumer automotive application would be dependent partly on how it behaves on impact. Car windows are made of tempered glass so that they shatter into tiny bits when breaking, rather than large shards that would have much bigger cutting edges. The front windshield is made of a laminate (usually 2 glass layers with a plastic layer in the middle) that is designed to hold the windshield together in mostly one piece even if the glass layers shatter. It is possible that an ALON windshield would reduce the probability of breakage in the first place or improve protection of the occupants from debris that would penetrate a conventional windshield, but people would need to conduct experiments to quantify that.

Also AlON was first used over 10 years ago. It's basically clear, synthetic Sapphire. AlON has also been used for bullet-resistant glass for years. Since it's chemically similar to Sapphire, but purer, it's actually hard enough you almost need a Diamond tipped instrument to scratch it.

Last I heard the stuff was SUPER-expensive. Mainly because you can't melt/pour it. It's shaped via "sintering" in which you powder it, then fill a mold with powder and heat the power until it starts to soften a little bit. This doesn't require anywhere near as much heat as full melting.

The video in the OP stated that Transparent Aluminum was currently 5 times as expensive as bullet resistant glass ($3 per square inch vs $15 per square inch). So according to the video, Transparent Aluminum is expensive, but not super-expensive.

Transparent Aluminum is now actually real

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