Stealth technologies and radiation protection - what the new glass is capable of.
For many years, the glazing produced by ONPP "Technology" has been used in the aerospace industry.
If the products for spacecraft are still piece orders, then the production of aviation glazing is serial production.
Externally, these glasses look like ordinary ones, but in fact they are a complex composite product – a product of structural optics, which may include one or more layers of glass and the finest metal deposition. Including noble ones, such as gold. About how these metals protect the pilot from ultraviolet and solar heat, and the aircraft itself from enemy radars, making the onboard electronics "invisible".
The cockpit lamp of a combat aircraft may be silicate, but polycarbonate is installed on new-generation fighters. Externally, such glass is difficult to distinguish from ordinary, but in fact it is a complex optical design. Each lamp has a special coating – a composition of various metals. It is this thinnest, almost invisible film that cuts off the thermal or ultraviolet component of the solar spectrum, shields the aircraft's own electromagnetic radiation, and protects the pilot from other negative factors.
The company experimentally found a composition that most fully meets the needs of designers – a combination of gold and indium tin oxide (so-called ITO). For this development, the team of authors received the award of the Government of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology.
As a clear example of the unique capabilities of such coatings, the fifth-generation Su-57 fighter can be cited. Together with carbon fiber panels of supporting structures, which were also manufactured in Obninsk, innovative glazing turns the Su-57 into an "invisible plane". Hiding on-board electronics from radars is perhaps the most difficult task for glazing – its own on-board equipment through unprotected glass gives a sufficiently strong illumination on enemy radars.
The Rostec portal notes that it was the multifunctional metal-optical coating that allowed the aircraft to become virtually invisible to electronic intelligence, because the thinnest composition of metals applied to the glazing surface reduced the visibility of the entire (!) fifth-generation fighter by a third.
