Foursprung: Anti-fog glass

It's winter again in the northern hemisphere and we all know this: glass fogs up when warm, moist air comes into contact with glass and cools so that thousands of tiny water droplets form on the glass - you see nothing. This might not be such a problem with your glasses but on the windscreen of a car makes the car finally useless for its original purpose until you waited a while with the engine running until the defogger did its job. What a waste of energy.

MIT researchers now have solution for this. They have developed a "permanent coating which keeps fog at bay. Their superhydrophillic — water loving — coating is composed of nanoparticles made of silica, the same material that glass is made from, to create a coating with a rough surface, although it looks smooth to the naked eye."

The very tiny particles of glass are assembled onto a surface using polymer chains having a positive charge. whereas the glass particles have a negative charge, so a positive to negative attractive force is used to build these layers up onto the surface. The net result is a very porous coating, that is, a coating that has lots of holes in it.
This structure of pores attract the tiny droplets of water that make up the foggy surface. Stacked ten to twenty layers thick, with air pockets in between, these pores create what's called a "wicking" effect, which forms the water droplets into a uniform sheet.

This cheaply developed technnology also increases the clarity of unfogged glass. Allowing 99 % of light to pass through the glass, compared to untreated glass which deflects Four to Eight percent of light.

Foursprung, safety

Source: ScienCentral

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