Smartphone geeks must have heard about Corning’s Gorilla Glass. But do you know what is it and how it protects your smartphones? Take a look at this article to understand more!

Corning’s Gorilla Glass: The process of producing

First of all let’s take about the Gorilla Glass itself! This kind of glass is manufactured by an American brand called Corning Incorporated. The glass goes through a chemical strengthening process, which make it only 0.4mm thin but still resistant to scratch and impact from the outside! In order to form such kind of glass, two main processes are conducted!

The first process is called fusion draw! Glass itself is a high-quality mixture of aluminium, oxygen and silicon. This mixture is molten into liquid. This liquid is poured into a long v-shaped trough. This flow runs down the two sides of the trough and rejoin at the bottom, forming a single sheet of glass! This process keeps the sheet very pure and thin! Then the product cooled down and cut into smaller rectangle sheets and all these sheets will go through the next step!

The second process is called ion exchange, those sheets of glass created from the fist step are actually pure normal glass! They are still very easy to break! In this step, all of them are placed into a 400 degree C bath of molten salt! This method helps draw out all the sodium atoms from the surface of the sheets, and these atoms are replaced with larger potassium atoms.

Corning’s Gorilla Glass: What is the final result?

The replacement above is actually what makes the final product! With larger atoms in an unchanged area, the surface of the glass is much more compressed! And that compression makes those atoms really attached to each other! As a result, the glass, which is already the Corning’s Gorilla Glass, is more resistant to impact from the outside!