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Self healing glass (1 Viewer)

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Binastro

Well-known member
A Japanese student has found a self healing glass that repairs itself if cracked or broken.
He was researching plastics and polymers.
One just presses it together at room temperature for 30 seconds maybe.

So no more expensive binocular repairs?
I wonder if it repairs scratched coatings and scratched glass.
 
Binastro said:
A Japanese student has found a self healing glass that repairs itself if cracked or broken.
He was researching plastics and polymers.
One just presses it together at room temperature for 30 seconds maybe.

So no more expensive binocular repairs?
I wonder if it repairs scratched coatings and scratched glass.
Click to expand...

Doubtful how that could work on binocular lenses.

Jerry
 
sure it just a polymer between two layers of glass that fill in the crack and air dry to hold the crack together....sort of a more sophisticated chip fix windshield repairs....
 
I think he was researching glues and found this by accident.

It isn't a substance between layers, the material heals itself.

The question is, will it retain an accurate shape?

I could see it being useful for the eye lenses of eyepieces that often get scratched, but don't know how it would retain multicoating layers.
 
Last edited:
It was called glass in the press item, but they were talking about its being used for camera phone screens and similar items.

Press reports, especially early ones are often wrong, but I don't know the chemical composition. It might be kept secret?

Fluorite crystal is also sometimes called glass.

Perhaps someone can find more details.

There are some high tech lenses made with multicoated plastics also. The coatings look weird, bright colours.

There was an aspheric version of the Vivitar solid Cat made of plastics, 450mm /4.5 that could not at the time be successfully produced commercially or at least didn't sell well, and it had problems.

I think many aspherics in camera lenses are plastic or plastic stuck on glass.
Maybe aspheric binocular elements also?
 
Last edited:
Binastro said:
It was called glass in the press item, but they were talking about its being used for camera phone screens and similar items.

Press reports, especially early ones are often wrong, but I don't know the chemical composition. It might be kept secret?

Fluorite crystal is also sometimes called glass.

Perhaps someone can find more details.

There are some high tech lenses made with multicoated plastics also. The coatings look weird, bright colours.

There was an aspheric version of the Vivitar solid Cat made of plastics, 450mm /4.5 that could not at the time be successfully produced commercially or at least didn't sell well, and it had problems.

I think many aspherics in camera lenses are plastic or plastic stuck on glass.
Maybe aspheric binocular elements also?
Click to expand...

I know I'm ignorant, but I am not familiar with any "plastic" (non-glass) optics that are worth a hoot. I don't even know how you get polymers with sufficiently high refractive indices, let alone favorable dispersion.

Polishing the surfaces to sufficient accuracy would seem to be another problem.

I remain unconvinced that it is "plastic".
 
Maljunulo said:
I know I'm ignorant, but I am not familiar with any "plastic" (non-glass) optics that are worth a hoot. I don't even know how you get polymers with sufficiently high refractive indices, let alone favorable dispersion.

Polishing the surfaces to sufficient accuracy would seem to be another problem.

I remain unconvinced that it is "plastic".
Click to expand...

Glass RI ranges from 1.5 to 1.9, while the refractive index range of plastic is only 1.5 to 1.74. Glass lenses can be much thinner but plastics don't splinter. They can work OK for some spectacles and I have read that plastic aspherics are quite widely used in lens groups mainly of glass inside very expensive photo lenses, because the aspherical shapes you can make with plastic are very difficult or impossible to achieve with glass and they can control various aberrations.

Lee
 
It may be that the Nikon EX, Aculon, and Action VII binoculars have aspheric hybrid lens elements, i.e. plastic/glass combination.
The Action VII had a wavy magnification as one crossed the field but normally this wasn't a problem. I had to look for it.

Minolta had a zoom lens camera with 4 elements using hybrid elements that was as good or better than a conventional zoom lenses with several more elements. Maybe 20 years ago.

I think that plastics are common in lenses, even high class ones.
 
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