Gorilla Glass

Gorilla Glass is a brand of chemically strengthened glass developed and manufactured by Corning, now in its sixth generation, designed to be thin, light and damage-resistant. Gorilla Glass is unique to Corning, but close equivalents exist, including AGC Inc. Dragontrail and Schott AG Xensation. Gorilla Glass is a brand of chemically strengthened glass developed and manufactured by Corning, now in its sixth generation, designed to be thin, light and damage-resistant. Gorilla Glass is unique to Corning, but close equivalents exist, including AGC Inc. Dragontrail and Schott AG Xensation. The alkali-aluminosilicate sheet glass is used primarily as cover glass for portable electronic devices, including mobile phones, portable media players, portable computer displays, and television screens. It is manufactured in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, US; Asia, Korea; and Taiwan. The glass gains its surface strength, ability to contain flaws, and crack-resistance by being immersed in a proprietary, hot, potassium-salt, ion-exchange bath. Corning experimented with chemically strengthened glass in 1960, as part of a 'Project Muscle' initiative. Within a few years they had developed a 'muscled glass' marketed as Chemcor. The product was used until the early 1990s in commercial and industrial applications, including automotive, aviation and pharmaceutical uses, notably in approximately one hundred 1968 Dodge Dart and Plymouth Barracuda racing cars, where minimizing the vehicle's weight was essential. Experimentation was revived in 2005, investigating whether the glass could be made thin enough for use in consumer electronics. It was brought into commercial use when Apple asked Corning for a thin, toughened glass to be used in its new iPhone. As of October 2017, some five billion devices globally contain Gorilla Glass. While dominating its market, Gorilla Glass faces varying competition from rivals such as Dragontrail and synthetic sapphire. Corning further developed the material for a variety of smartphones and other consumer electronics devices for a range of companies. The manufacturer markets the material's primary properties as its high scratch-resistance (protective coating) and its hardness (with a Vickers hardness test rating of 622 to 701), which allows the glass to be thin without fragility. It can be recycled. By 2010, the glass had been used in approximately 20% of mobile handsets worldwide, about 200 million units. The second generation, called 'Gorilla Glass 2', was introduced in 2012. On October 24, 2012, Corning announced that over one billion mobile devices used Gorilla Glass. Gorilla Glass 2 is 20% thinner than the original Gorilla Glass. Gorilla Glass 3 was introduced at CES 2013. According to Corning, the material is up to three times more scratch-resistant than the previous version, with enhanced ability to resist deep scratches that typically weaken glass. The promotional material for Gorilla Glass 3 claims that it is 40% more scratch-resistant, in addition to being more flexible. The design of Gorilla Glass 3 was Corning's first use of atomic-scale modeling before the material was melted in laboratories, with the prediction of the optimal composition obtained through the application of rigidity theory.