A 3D-printable quartz glass for high-performance applications (2023) | Hacker News Reader

A 3D-printable quartz glass for high-performance applications (2023)

lithoz.com

39 pointsBluestein16 comments

My take on the press release is that they're announcing a collaboration between two companies.

Lithoz uses photopolymerization to 3-D print a variety of ceramics, and is in the business of selling 3-D printers.

Glassomer makes the "ink" - they've got a few patents on silica + binder dating back to 2016.

All of this is similar to many things that have been done in the scientific literature (e.g. Nature Materials volume 20, pages 1506–1511 (2021)). They've put it into production and made it purchasable.

I'm not up on state-of-the-art, so I'm not sure if this has any features that differentiate it from competitors. I'm not seeing any surprises.

This should be close to SotA, it's from the same team, this month:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202405320

There is one sentence worth of information here. Can you share more?

Am intrigued myself. Will, opportunity permitting.-

PS. This ...

- https://www.glassomer.com/technology.html

... might be a nice starting point.-

To wit:

""Glass outperforms polymers in many applications and is unmatched in its combination of high thermal, chemical stability paired with high transparency. However, today customers often use polymers instead of glass – because glass shaping is inherently more difficult than polymer shaping. Glassomer changes that.""

The applications - it seems to me particularly - in optoelectronic circuits would be tremendous.-

PS. This quartz process and product is 3D-printable and moldable, as if it were plastic.-

The video here is interesting.

> The applications - it seems to me particularly - in optoelectronic circuits would be tremendous.

Research level optics is very high quality glass [1], with surface irregularity down to 100s of nm. But the company is trying to sell lenses [2], so perhaps for some cheap commercial applications you can create nice lenses using this method. That would be still be excellent.

[1] https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=12...

[2] https://www.glassomer.com/products/lenses.html

Nicely found.-

> with surface irregularity down to 100s of nm.

That is an amazing level of precision.-

To give this some fun context, carbon atoms are roughly 0.1 nm across. So that's means little bumps of 100s or 1000s of atoms are allowed on the surface.

Might seem bad at first glance, but I think it just points to how small atoms really are. Besides, such bumps don't really effect the light being used.

Coming back to 3D printing, if their surface irregularity is two orders of magnitude worse, that means 100k atom bumps. Really speaks to how difficult these engineering challenges are.

> think it just points to how small atoms really are

A fascinating fact, along with how hollow ...

PI from Glassomer's team reports sub-micrometer resolution elsewhere, see

(July 2024)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202405320

This class of methods should be able to reach submicron resolution. I am fairly certain the various teams are working hard to improve that. Regarding optoelectronics, perhaps these are already good enough for NIR applications?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38996-3

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46929-x

I wonder if you can change the index of refraction inside the bulk material. Might be cool for this kind of thing where you can make passive classifiers.

https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-glass-requ...

Now just imagine some future civilization digging up a 300B neuron LLM glas cube, casting the oddest shadow.

Whose first output when finally wired up is ... a Rickroll :)

Mechanical properties so desirable they mentioned it twice! I would love to see a demo of the optical performance (such as a polished flat).

Indeed. I noticed that emphasis.-

There has to be some drawbacks that are not mentioned and I'd be curious.-

Transparent AlON-- aluminum oxynitride (on HN frontpage at some point today!)-- can also be 3d printed with a very similar process (much higher temps though!)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09552... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266653952...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41186708

>Because of its relatively low weight, distinctive optical and mechanical properties, and resistance to oxidation or radiation, it shows promise for applications such as bulletproof, blast-resistant, and optoelectronic windows.

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