South Korea R & D of new materials: hardness such as glass, bendable plastic

Fold the foldable smartphone can go further! KAIST (South Korea Institute of Technology), known as "Massachusetts Institute of Technology in South Korea," has developed a new plastic film that is as hard as glass and as flexible as plastic, and is expected to accelerate the advent of foldable phones 2018 will be listed. South Korean media Etnews reported on the 10th that the screen of a smartphone is covered with a glass substrate to protect the screen from external shocks and the glass is transparent and colorless without affecting the color display of the display. The problem is the glass substrate can not be bent, easy to crack, not suitable for folding smart phones. In order to develop foldable cell phones, the industry replaces glass substrates with transparent plastic films, although plastic films can be bent, but not sufficiently rigid to provide adequate protection for the screen. Bae Byeong-soo, a professor at New Material Engineering Department at KAIST, announced that it has developed a flexible hard coating technology to solve this challenge. Bae said siloxane polymers are glass-like and have plastic-like elasticity. They use the display to the inside of the test, found that the new material hardness of 9H, you can bend more than 200,000. He said that this kind of material can also be used to outward fold the screen. Prior to this, Kolon Industries in South Korea has developed a plastic film, with KAIST's flexible hard coating technology, which enhances the plastic film hardness and accelerates the folding business process.