The glasses' lenses no longer fog up thanks to a unique coating created by researchers at ETH Zurich. Since the invention of optical lenses, fogging has been an issue.
Still, it's fair to say that it peaked during the pandemic when everyone wearing glasses learned the hard way that most face masks vent your breath into your eyes. This should have been fixed by now, but it's trickier than you might think.
The absence of existing answers reveals how challenging the issue is. If your glasses fog up, you can clean them, but that's about it. Anti-fog sprays and specialized lens coatings are helpful, but they merely reduce the issue.
Gold-Based Transparent Coating Would Solve Glasses Fog Forever
When warm vapor comes into contact with glasses' colder lenses, they fog. Your glasses become foggy because of the moisture that results from the vapor turning into moisture due to the temperature change.
Sadly, warming up glasses is not an easy task. By using conventional techniques, you would need to choose a transparent material that can be heated from the outside, create a power source for the material, and ensure no risk of overheating the lenses or the frames. That's a rather difficult task because additional thickness or weight will make the user feel worse.
By using an alternative strategy, the ETH Zurich team was able to overcome these engineering challenges. Interesting Engineering said the engineers created a unique gold coating that generates heat using solar energy. Other than the coating itself, it doesn't require a battery, wiring, or other components.
The reports mentioned that it functions by sandwiching extremely thin layers of titanium oxide between small clusters of gold. Gold is an excellent heat conductor, and the titanium oxide layers increase the metal's heat retention to precisely the right degree, making it ideal for warming surfaces like glass and others.
It can be utilized with other coatings and is only 10 nanometers thick (the processing size for some microchips); thus, it should work with transition lenses and for use in automotive windshields, among other applications. Scientists are determined to test the coating on different surfaces like windows and mirrors.
How Other Optics Could Benefit From This
It will be intriguing to observe how other optics, including sensors and lasers, can benefit from this coating. The uses for this coating may be unlimited, and the researchers maintain that it is more pricey than one might assume, given the little quantity of gold required to make it.
Although this method's exact amount of heat is unknown, the researchers assert that it can raise the surface's temperature by as much as 8 degrees Celsius. That will undoubtedly be sufficient to prevent vapor from fogging your glasses in most situations. However, it needs to produce more useable electricity.
Even though it's unlikely to end the global energy issue, this might improve life for the billions of people who wear glasses.
Researchers published their study in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
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