Along with zirconium and aluminium oxynitride, synthetic sapphire is used for shatter resistant windows in armored vehicles and various military body armor suits, in association with composites.
A common use of synthetic sapphire is in sapphire optical windows. The key benefits of sapphire windows are:
- Very wide optical transmission band from UV to near-infrared, (0.15-5.5 µm)
-Significantly stronger than other optical materials or standard glass windows
- The hardest natural substance next to diamond
- Highly resistant to scratching and abrasion (9 Mohs scale)
- Extremely high melt temperature (2030°C)
-Totally unaffected by all chemicals except some very hot caustics
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| Blue Sapphire |
Sapphire glass windows (although being crystalline) are made from pure sapphire boules that have been grown in an application specific crystal orientation, typically along the optical axis, the c-axis, for standard optical windows for minimum birefringence. The boules are sliced up into the desired window thickness and finally polished to the desired surface finish. Sapphire optical windows can be polished to a wide range surface finishes due to its crystal structure and it hardness. The surface finishes of Optical Windows are normally called out by the Scratch-Dig specifications in accordance with the globally adopted MIL-O-13830 specification.
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| Synthetic Sapphire Applications |
Sapphire glass windows are used in high pressure chambers for spectroscopy, crystals in various watches, and windows in grocery store barcode scanners since the material's exceptional hardness and toughness makes it very resistant to scratching.
Cermax xenon arc lamp with synthetic sapphire output window One type of xenon arc lamp (originally called the "Cermax" its first brand name), which is now known generically as the "ceramic body xenon lamp", uses sapphire crystal output windows that tolerate higher thermal loads – and thus higher output powers when compared with conventional Xe lamps with pure silica window.
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