Plastic to replace glass in electronics screens?

China: In computers and other such equipment, it won’t be long before traditional glass screens are substituted by flexible plastic panels made from bio-composites, predicts Chinese-Canadian plastics entrepreneur Wayne Song.

With commercialisation now close for a cutting-edge solution based on mixing nano-scale natural fibres with polycarbonate and other optical-grade plastics, gadgets with glass screens will soon be a thing of the past, according to Mr Song. The CEO of Futuresoft Technologies Inc. uses fibres which are around 50 nanometres wide - 1/1000th the thickness of a human hair. Their performance rivals that of the specialised glass used at present.

The Song process can depend on a range of natural fibres, such as aloe, crab shells and wood. ‘Nano-materials are big, everybody is doing it and the market is huge,’ he argues. ‘But the bottleneck is the processing and how to disperse the fibres in an efficient, economical way.’ While many people are making the particles, it is vital that they are ‘delivered in a useful fashion’.

Operating from Jiangyin in China, Futuresoft aims to use a cast-film process to manufacture the film for the display panels instead of making the display panels directly. Mr Song expects this to result in an advanced plastic screen that is both flexible and hard to break, thus opening up many new applications.

According to Mr Song, US$ 1 million has been invested in the research effort to produce a fully functional as well as commercial prototype.