Obvious answer is probably safety glass. If it outperformed current bullet resistant glass, it could make some people safer. Structural glass would also be good, so you could have better storm windows, greenhouses, etc. It also would be useful for making inspection easier in some cases. Pressurized vessels could have more visibility or more structural strength. Aquariums could be less bulky.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Answer Questions never been answered before (probably because they have never been asked)
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Aquariums would not get less bulky, but we would not have catastrophic failure
More durable teapots? See through thermos bottle? See through radiators? See through bathroom sink or tub?
the last one does not seem useful (unless you record videos, upload them on ceertain hub)
Transparent metallic containers would be a revolution - cooking pots, gas cylinders, even electronics. We could even have transparent wires (transparent insulation is already a thing).
OP is probably asking, because transparent aluminum already exists, yet isn't used widely
not really, but there are some methods to grow materials a bit more generally that they are transparent to some wavelengths. It is not new, or anything, and is used in other structured materials.
The name is misleading because transparent aluminium is actually a ceramic, not a metal, so its properties are nothing like you'd expect from a metal - it has low thermal and electrical conductivities, it's more likely to fracture than to bend, etc.
I was thinking the same thing; there's not enough information in the post to answer. Not all metals are ferrous; many don't conduct electricity or are not magnetic. Non-ferrous metals are useless for making cookware to be used with (increasingly popular) induction stoves, so "clear pans" might not be the best idea.
Metals also have different thermal conductivity. Aluminum's is great, but the uses for pure aluminum cookware is limited; when it is used, it's usually clad in much more durable stainless steel, and the visual characteristics consequently utterly irrelevant.
Is this unnamed clear metal ferrous? Does it have good thermal conductivity? What's its density - is it heavy? You're not going to be using it in airplane windows if it's heavier than glass. What's its hardness? How brittle is it? Not going to be in vehicle windshields if it's brittle, or scratches easily.
As you imply, there are a lot of characteristics that affect the usefulness of a material in any given application. It's why materials science is so important to product design.
Yup - thankfully OP did provide some metal as reference, aluminium. From that we can guess it's non-ferrous, light, good thermal and electrical conductivity.
I wasn't aware that non-ferrous metals couldn't be used with induction stoves (I use gas). But I guess you could still get transparent sides, and a steel bottom? (...I really want to see my food cooking!)
you can still cook food in glasswaree, it would be slow. Or if you have microwave, then you can definitely see food cooking already.
Yeah. Induction stoves work by invoking magnetic current in the metal that's resting on the plates. For that to happen, the material needs to be ferrous. Pure copper won't work, and alloys are less effective.
It's a minor inconvenience. You can't use glass tea kettles or copper (as I said), for instance, but most stovetop cookware of already ferrous: cast iron skillets and stainless steel, mostly. Most modern cookware with copper or aluminum is steel clad with the other material as a core, because steel is vastly more corrosion resistant. That works fine, the steel gets hot and transfers heat to the core and it's business as usual. Almost nobody buys pure copper cookware anymore, and nobody in their right mind would buy pure aluminum cookware. The real issue is that tempered glass is still moderately popular for some uses, and that's useless on inductive stoves.
Technically speaking, any conductor* could be used as induction heater, it would just not be good. Even for paramagnetic stuff, you still have spins which will have some exchange energy, and some from external field. It may not have a high resistance to the changing fields, but almost everything does have some resistance (what i am saying is, is that almost all materials have some non zero resistance an dnon zero susceptance).
There's probably not enough joules being generated by a domestic induction stove to generate more heat in a non-ferrous material than is lost through common radiation at room temperature. Not enough to be noticeable without instruments, in any case.
touche