Scratch-resistant lenses

Intro:
Hi guys! We are Sakura and Giorgio and we’re going to explain what scratch-
resistant lenses, its uses and and how they were created.

What are scratch resistant lenses?

Well, as their name suggests, they’re lenses resistant to scratches, bumps and other
damage because the lenses are made by coating plastic lenses with hard protective
layers. This coating is applied to the front and back of the lenses. It’s generally made
with materials like high index polycarbonate which is highly impact-resistant, and
high-quality anti reflective materials like Crizal that protect your glasses as well as
giving clear vision.

Its space program origins:

Before, in NASA and glasses in general, to create lenses, the material used was, well,
glass. However, while it couldn’t be scratched, it was very fragile and prone to
shattering. So instead, glassmakers decided to resort to plastic yet the same thing
happened, but inversely: it wouldn’t break, but it was scratched easily. To make
things worse, NASA had other struggles to take care of, and one of them was
developing a water filter. It needed to have a special filter, and these were difficult to
create. One day, the team thought up of using plasma polymerization. They would
introduce filter paper into a glass jar, take out the air, add in either nitrogen, argon,
and other chemicals to create plastic, and ionize it.

With this procedure, other coatings were able to be created. When the plastic lenses
were introduced, NASA teams decided to apply one of these coatings, this one made
with carbon and silicon, and it made the plastic lenses even more resistant and
harder to scratch, and that’s how scratch resistant lenses came to be.

Current Uses:
Today, scratch resistant lenses are used almost everywhere: they replace plastic and
glass eyeglasses, and are now used commonly. Common eyeglasses are harder to
scratch and to shatter, keeping sights safer and better. Not only that, but they’re also
used in other glasses like diving masks, sunglasses and windshields in cars. Now, not
every lense is scratch resistant, but these specialized coats can be applied to them,
since they can help people be safer, by improving their vision.

Process of Creation:
The making process involves coating the lenses with a film of diamond-like carbon (also
called DLC) that not only provides protection to scratches but it also reduces surface
friction, making the lenses shed water more easily to reduce spotting. The Lewis
Research Center founded to get the advantages of diamond without the high cost by
depositing a thin film of DLC on an inexpensive substrate, which is a supporting material.
Who has been benefited most:
And most of us use this invention because almost all glasses and sunglasses have
scratch resistant glasses for instance (drops the glasses and picks them up) if my
glasses didn't have the scratch resistant lense surely they would be broken like the
glasses like the ones from 50 years ago.