[ad_1]
On the long list of things you should never, ever shine a laser pointer on an airplane is really very close to the top. They may seem harmless when you use a laser pointer to play with your cat, but the light beams produced by the small tools can interfere with the pilot's orientation and even cause vision damage when hitting a cockpit.
Every year, pilots report thousands of "attack" ads by laser pointers on planes, and the fools who do these things do not seem to understand. Now, the researchers have developed a way for pilots to fight the morons manipulating the laser with a new windshield technology that kills lasers before they cause a problem.
In a presentation at the Spring meeting of the American Chemical Society this year, researchers presented a new type of material that could be added to aircraft windshields in the not-too-distant future.
The material uses a liquid crystal solution sandwiched between two glass layers. When the special liquid crystal formulation is normally transparent, but when it receives an electric charge, it becomes more opaque. Combined with a sensor that detects that the aircraft is targeted by a laser beam, the material automatically blocks the incoming laser.
According to the team that developed the system, the liquid crystal barrier can block up to 95% of lasers in a variety of colors, including the most common red, green, and blue. This is all the more important since earlier laser anti-attenuation technologies often only treated certain laser colors and did not affect others.
"We wanted to come up with a solution that does not require us to completely rethink the windshield of an airplane, but rather add a layer to the glass that leverages the existing power system for windshield defrosting" said Daniel Maurer, undergraduate student at University of Lewis who worked on the project, said in a statement.
In the future, this technology could be applied to existing aircraft with few modifications, protecting pilots from ground laser pointers without the need for a completely new windshield or other more complex upgrades.
Image Source: Steve Meddle / REX / Shutterstock
[ad_2]
Source link