Amazing Piezoelectric Ceramic Goggles

Ceramics are the oldest silicate materials. With the development of science and technology, modern ceramic materials with special excellent properties have developed rapidly, and have been widely used. Of course, ceramics in the military field are not far behind.

One day, there was a mysterious guest at the new materials research center in the United States who was an air force pilot at the U.S. Nuclear Test Site, bringing a new research topic. It turned out that a detonation of an explosive energy equivalent to 20, 000 tons of TNT was released in three seconds with the radiation of 7 billion calories in nuclear war or nuclear test, which causes the eyes to be burned by a nuclear flash, even if the person is far away from the center of the explosion. By the time the nuclear flash was discovered, it was too late for the air force pilot to wear protective glasses.

How to solve this problem? Researchers used to design a protective helmet for them, but the control of which was a high-voltage power supply, so the pilot had to carry dozens of kilograms of silicon steel transformers, which was cumbersome and troublesome. So they asked the New Materials Research Center for new material for the goggles. The researchers chose a lot of materials to experiment with, and the ideal material for the final selection was ceramics. However, it is not ordinary ceramic, but a special “polarizing” ceramic. This kind of ceramic can transform the mechanical force and light energy into electric energy, which can transform the electrical energy into mechanical energy under the action of the electric field. This special function is called “piezoelectric effect”, and the ceramic with this piezoelectric effect is called piezoelectric ceramic.

The tester is extremely handy with special goggles made of transparent piezoelectric ceramics. After the atomic bomb explosion, the control device of the photoelectric protective eyepiece immediately turned it into a transient high voltage when the nuclear flash intensity reached a dangerous level, and the protective mirror automatically dimmed rapidly, which can reduce the intensity of light to only one-millionth of the original in a thousandth of a second. After the danger, it can also recover automatically without affecting the tester’s vision. The piezoelectric ceramic goggles are simple in structure and weigh only a few dozen grams, and are only as large as a matchbox, which is easy to install on the anti-nuclear helmet.

Please visit http://www.samaterials.com for more information.