What Is Gorilla Glass?

What Is Gorilla Glass?

While buying a new electronic device you would have heard salesperson saying that the device screen is protected by Gorilla glass or your friend saying that his mobile has gorilla glass. You would have come across it many times but you would not be knowing the about it and its characteristics. In this post I will give details about Gorilla glasses, its characteristics and how it is made.

What is Gorilla Glass?

Gorilla Glass is a specific brand of glass manufactured by Corning Inc. (a U.S. based glass manufacturing company). Gorilla glass consists of a thin sheet of alkali-aluminosilicate and is thin and hard glass used by variety of electronic devices to protect the screen from scratches and it reduces breaking of screens from sudden forces up to certain extent i.e Gorilla glasses are impact-resistant. Gorilla glasses have following major characteristics as compared to other normal glasses.

Gorilla glass

Characteristics of Gorilla Glass

• Hard
• Thin
• Light-weight
• Impact resistant
• Scratch resistant

Above characteristics together makes the Gorilla glass unique from other glasses. The scratch- and impact-resistant qualities in Gorilla Glass, combined with its incredibly thin profile, enable it to protect device displays without adding significant weight or interfering with capacitive touch screens which is an important factor for touch enabled mobile devices.

How Gorilla glass is made and how it differs from other glasses?

The glass consists of a thin sheet of alkali-aluminosilicate. Gorilla glass is made of mixture containing sand, limestone and sodium carbonate that is melted at high temprature. The glass is strengthened using an ion-exchange process which forces large ions into the spaces between molecules on the glass surface.

Specifically, glass is placed in a 400°C molten potassium salt bath, which forces potassium ions to replace the sodium ions originally in the glass and this makes Gorilla glass different from other glasses. The larger potassium ions take up more space between the other atoms in the glass. As the glass cools, the crunched-together atoms produce a high level of compressive stress in the glass that helps protect the surface from mechanical damage.

First mobile usage of Gorilla glass was done by Apple in 2007 to protect the screen of IPhone. There are various types of Gorilla glasses available like Gorilla Glass 2 and Gorilla Glass 3. Gorilla glass 2 is the newer form of Gorilla glass and is 20% thinner than the previous one but with same toughness.