Eli5 why can’t you make a “Prince Ruperts drop” without a tail to have no vulnerabilities.
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This is basically how tempered glass is made, just not quite so maxed out.
You probably could use some sort of container to heat up a piece of glass in a ball shape and then rapidly quench that to get a tail-less Prince Rupert Drop, just this is a lot of work for something with very limited utility where the drawbacks (catastrophic failure without notice) outweigh advantages for anything you’d use it in.
You make it by dropping the glass/liquid, when you drop it the gravity makes it into a tear shape, thus the last bit to get heated up will be narrower and it will be stretched thin.
We can. Melt it off, for example. This has been done and results in the kind of very hard to destroy glass you would expect.
Wouldn’t this essentially be ball bearing?
I mean you can, they are called glass marbles.
As much hype there is about the drops being “indestructible” it’s just tempered glass. The prince rupert’s drop is mostly just a neat curiosity because they are easy to make and have a built in vulnerability in the tail that causes them to just explode.
Then it wouldn’t be a prince Rupert’s drop, it’d just be a glass ball, which I Believe is pretty damn strong
Looking at the comments, I have another question to add.
Who the F**k is Prince Rupert? And why are his drops so strong, yet also delicate?
Inquiring minds want to know. Yet don’t want to waste time googling.
I don’t think there’s anything that prevents creating a completely round prince Rupert drop. It’s just that it would be expensive and difficult to create. One way would be to suspend a marble of glass suspended by jets of heated air until the entire ball reaches the appropriate temperature. Then switch off the jets and have the ball fall into a container of cold water.
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