How does gold protect glasses from fogging up?
Average reading time — 2 minutes
An incredible creation of Swiss scientists will help, first of all, those who wear glasses.
Researchers from Zurich, thanks to modern technology, presented the world with a unique invention with gold.
In the photo: the innovation made by scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich), the most prestigious and advanced university in Europe. More than 20 Nobel Prize winners are graduates of this educational institution.
The precious metal nano-coating is applied to lenses between two layers of titanium oxide. The technology enhances the ongoing processes and allows absorbing infrared radiation even when the lenses are dimly lit, thereby heating them. Any other coatings that have been used in production before have simply distributed the water evenly. In this case, the real magic happens.
Gold acts in such a way that it is much more difficult for condensation to form on the surface, and glasses either do not fog up at all, or fog up slightly, and also thaw many times faster. The price of glasses will not be sky-high, because the consumption of the valuable metal is minimal: a layer of only 10 nanometers is required for coating.
A nanometer is a unit of length equal to one billionth of a meter.
For comparison, a human hair is on average 7,000 times thicker than the gold layer needed to make the invention work.
The use of the yellow metal in titanium oxide “packaging” allows not only to heat the lenses by 8 ºC without the use of artificial energy sources, but also to prevent the wear and tear of gold.The invention will be appreciated by those who know what kind of discomfort fogged glasses have.
The discovery of scientists from Zurich has already attracted the attention of the automotive industry specialists. If the use of gold is brought on stream, then this will save millions of car owners from the eternal problem — fogging of windshields or mirrors in a vehicle.
The world does not stand still, more and more new ideas of brilliant minds become breakthroughs for the technologies of the future. Gold still plays a huge role in this.
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