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New Alloy Stronger Than Fe And Ti
SoCalChris writes "According to this article on MSNBC.com, researchers at CalTech have discovered a new alloy that is stronger than steel and titanium, can be cast in a mold like plastic, and sharpened like glass. The first plans for the new alloy are to be used in golf clubs, baseball bats, skis, and cell phone covers."
My girlfriend needs this metal for a new dildo
Will they make a PowerBook out of it? :)
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
Fe is iron, not steel. Steel is an alloy, not an element.
Fe is iron, the element, not steel, which is a compound out of iron and trace amounts of carbon.
Rearden Metal anyone? Better, stronger, lighter, faster, slices, dices, washs the car but held down by The Man.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
So the crew of the Enterprise really did really travel back in time. Scotty must have told someone.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
As they say in the article it isn't anything new. They just make it a bit thicker, why is this even news?
Maybe this could be applied to the automotive design industry to design stronger. lighter cars. And they would be able to withstand head on collisions!
What are they licensing this material? How do they say what the planned usages are if anyone can make anything? Or are they limiting the usages somehow?
A great use for this is in aircraft construction. By reducing weight the planes will fly farther on less fuel, and fighters will turn sharper since they will have a lower wing loading. I'm wondering, if other countries try to produce this new metal, if that will be an infringement on someone's intellectual property ?
And scientific information here
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I am no combat expert (nor have I ever been in combat or weapons design) but I would expect that snipers would love these things. A non-explosive but very pointy bullet could be very useful for piercing armoured vehicles with hand-held weapons.
Some battlebots guy is creaming his jeans.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
But seriously, this looks very interesting, I imagine car and aircraft manufacturers could use a metal such as this. A lot depend on the cost to make and machine it though.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The article mentions 'twice as strong as steel and titanium', yet does not quote which 'strength' this refers to (or gives any real objective data). I suspect it might have high tensile strength (hard to break by pulling it apart)...
But materials like this tend also to be brittle, and do not do well in other kinds of loading. Take 'fatigue' loading, for instance. This measures how well it holds up to repeated loads, such as crankshaft in a car. Materials with uncrystalline structures not only tend to fail quickly under repeated loads, but also tend to fell catastrophically (breaking in two, instead of gradually bending).
The article doesn't give enough info to verify this - just my thoughts. In material science, you generally have to make a compromise - in this case, tensile strength against fatigue life.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
They use rifles because the rifled barrel enables the bullet to travel farther than a hand-gun would. It would suck, rather much, to be a sniper and have to get up close and personal...
:P)
(This spoken as a shameless Q3 sniper.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
"The first plans for the new alloy are to be used in golf clubs, baseball bats, skis, and cell phone covers."
From the article:
"Liquidmetal Technologies' first product was golf club heads..."
From their website: ..."
"Taking advantage of a revolutionary class of a next generation super alloy that was originally launched in golf clubs in 1998,
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Arched and domed ceilings should be made of this new metal -- they will have a much lower wieght, exert less pressure on walls and supports, lower building costs, and be less likely to fall. Also, making a sky scraper that won't collapse if hit by an airplane will be eaiser if the internal skeleton of the tower is built from this stuff.
...I only want to know when I'll be able to buy a PowerBook made from it.
adamantium?
""The first plans for the new alloy are to be used in golf clubs, baseball bats, skis, and cell phone covers.""
"What a great country!"
Yeah, it would be best used to feed the poor...
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The company attempting to commercialize this needs as much hype as they can get, since they don't seem to have any substantial sales, and are very likely funded by (or will be funded by) VC's and other investors.
Getting an article like this in the press is really just fodder for investors, and possibly future customers. Objective news, it's not - this is just an advertisement for the commercial outfit.
It may be stong, and it seems to be able to be tooled razor thin straight from the mold, but how practical is it to work with? You don't see many scalpels or tools being made from titanium currently, or even cell phone cases for that matter. The costs seems to be the prohibiting factor, but is that really it? I mean, if you could make the same strength/quality object for 1/10 the material, then you can have up to 10x the materials cost and still be doing well.
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
Researchers reverse engineered the alloy from a mysterious robotic arm found in a manufacturing plant.
because nobody ever reads the articles anyway:
"Much like glass, Liquidmetal softens when heated -- the earliest alloy at about 750 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, steel becomes malleable at about 2,100 degrees.
Cost also limits Liquidmetal. The raw materials run at $10 to $15 a pound, about as much as titanium, while aluminum costs about 50 cents a pound.
The heat-resistance property might make it not such a good replacement for titanium in space industry.
I can't believe that baseball bats are seriously considered as a first use for the substance. You never even see titanium bats these days because of league regulations. Bats are expensive as it is.
The alloy contains beryllium, a particularly toxic metal, requiring special handling.
Does this make this alloy hazardous as well?
Dude, if it's armor you want, check out Biosteel. It's as thin as a t-shirt, yet stronger than kevlar. The best part is it's made from a genetic blend of a goat and a spider. Pretty damn sweet if you ask me...
s te el.shtml
http://www.nexiabiotech.com/HTML/technology/bio
I noticed that no tensile or yield properties were listed for this material. When they refer to twice as strong as steel or titanium, that could mean tensile as low as ~30 ksi. Given the very low heat tolerance, this alloy has some interesting properties, but limited application. The desity could also be a limiting factor.
By contrast, some of the nickel maraging alloys exceed 350 ksi tensile and will tolerate more than 2000 F.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
That's a wierd way of saying that it can be molded to have an edge as sharp as glass. I don't think glass is normally sharpened per se.
- The first plans for the new alloy are to be used in golf clubs, baseball bats, skis, and cell phone covers.
What a great country!Feh, if those are the only uses planned for it in the near future I won't be seeing it at all for awhile, except maybe outside of some sort of exhibit or such, then again the types of places that 'exhibit' new golf clubs are not exactly the types of places that I would
(baseball bats? WTF? WHY?)
Hmm, the cell phone cover thing
I am getting sick and tired of plastic.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
and it's stronger than soggy lettuce!
As it is mentioned in the article, the first (Bats, Golf Clubs, Cell Phones) are uses that pose no real risks to anyone. As they say in the article, if they screw up a golf club, a customer gets a refund. If they screw up an airplane however, someone is dead, and the company will quite probably be held liable.
Being sued for the failure of a critical airplane part is not going to enhance shareholder value.
END COMMUNICATION
Now people will be able to sharpen their cellphones and use them as weapons directly, rather than having to use them as only part of the main weapon that is their SUV...
--- http://foo.ca
Methinks knife. Will this show up in security (airport metal detectors)?
"What happens with Liquidmetal, in essence, is that you can form parts sort of the way you form plastics,"
Yeah except for a little (500 deg. Farenheit) difference in the temperatures required.
Other than that, just about the same way.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Liquidmetal introduced their first golf club back in 1998. You can now find it in the bargain bin at most golf shops. The club was mediocre, nothing really great. I dont see what the big fuss is about.
...and Ginsu knives!
How long till some guy with unlimted funds builds a battlebot out of one of these...
Liquid metal and random walkers in one day... kinda like Terminator2? or maybe Cartman's trapper keeper...
I think they're full of crap about the shell. The reason that Depleted Uranium in tank shells, A-10 bullets, and Tank armor is not because it's particularly strong (it might be, but it's not terribly relevant).
It's because it's the most dense material known to man. Shells made of DU have ridiculous amounts of kinetic energy, and armor made of DU have an unprecidented ability to stop it. Hence, stories like this happen. (link contains general information about the use of DU in M1A1 tanks)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
someone is dead, and the company will quite probably be held liable.
No problem... They just need to get someone to click through a EULA before they order it from their website.
Don't blame me- I voted for Kodos!
I have to reply to this crap parent, as I can't post re: the article (how do I do that? missed many a 1st post from that :(
I've searched around the caltech site on this, but found nothing. Without rooting back to the original papers, does anyone know how this alloy performs at low temp? Many light metals and alloys become brittle at ultra low temps, so maybe the achilles heel of this metal becoming maliable at high temps, could become its hercules by outperforming the others at ultra-low temps.
Not thinking space crafts, but more in the line of super-conductors....
You break it on the corner of a table. I don't see how that works with something harder than titanium, though. :)
So, I can now make highly accurate metal parts in my home with zero machining or finishing stages.
Combine that with a computer controlled mill to make the wax images for the ceramic molds, and I can now build anything that the properties of the metal will support.
Technology kicks so much ass. And marketing-speak sucks donkey nuts.. what ARE the properties of this metal? How thick does it have to be to be used as a gun-barrel? Rigidity? mmm.. sigh.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
This isn't going to replace structural metals any time soon. How do I know? I did dynamic planar compressive strain experiments and ABAQUS on this stuff and composites with this as the matrix for my senior thesis.
Being a metallic glass, it has all sorts of crazy properites, as mentioned in the articles, but when it reaches the yeild strength it shatters (at least in non-composite form).
Also, because it is a metallic glass, it is inherently a meta-stable solid.... metals usually have relatively simple crystal structures, and thusly crystalize quickly with relatively small undercooling. The clever trick with this stuff is that it's a mix of four or five metallic elements that have a large span of atomic radii (this stuff is Zr-Ni-Cu-Ti-Be, various weightings of each, usually the Ni=Cu=Ti). Anyhow, when it finally does crystallize, whether due to heat, fatigue or constant strain, it forms a pretty complex crystal structure (I don't recall which one offhand) that allows very little motion of dislocations. Thus, it's super brittle when in it's thermodynamically stable state. Moreover, even with this clever alloying, it still requires high cooling rates to avoid crystallization from the melt, and is thusly hard to cast into large ingots.
Thus, whether it takes too hard an impact (can never be a tooling metal or knife, in pure form) or is under strain for too long (can never ever be a structural metal - too flaw sensitive in pure form and too expensive to process and machine in composite form) it will fail catastrophically.
Basically, this means it's pretty useless for most applications metals are required for (due to lack of crystal structure it's also a poor heat conductor - sorry overclockers). And because it is opaque, it can't be used for traditional glass applications. Liquid Metal has been around for a while trying to push the golf clubs, for at least three years, more like four or five, so I'm not sure what the sudden attention is for. We ran a back of the evelope calculation in my research group: Say you're on the links, and you mis-strike the ball, and hit a large rock in the ground with a non-composite liquidmetal club... basically you'll shatter the face of the head (only the face is amorphous due to process/cost/strength issues), sending shrapnel flying into your ankle. Yum.
Still, from a physics perspective, this stuff is really interesting due to its completely artificial nature (you'll never find anything close to this in nature) and odd mechanical properties (it's the metallic version of flubber). Commericially, in bulk form, I'd say they should shy away from structural applications and perhaps try transformers, where the thin film versions of amorphous metals have significant gains over silicon.
for their planned mission to mars if the boys and girls at Caltech can get the heat issue straight. Although space is pretty cold they could use it for a Travel Space craft and use something else for Landing and Take-offs.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
And don't forget Apple's gonna make their next laptop out of it!
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
There are so many questions being asked here about details... The company website has much more information than this article. Go to the source.
No, he's right. Everyone who went to Caltech (including myself) hates to see it spelled CalTech. I was about to post the exact same thing, but I decided I'd best search to see if someone beat me to it, which they did.
Not quite as expensive as all the "V"s on every HOVSE, but since no one actually wants to fix those, it's a non-issue.
Smith and Wesson has used Titanium and Scantium blends for revolvers for five or so years. If they got this, a .357 Magnum could be weighing next to nothing.
I'm a hamker. Hams, hackers, same ethos, different medium. == 73 de KB0STG
Insightful?
You ever see a Formula 1 car hit the wall at 200mph?
The car literally disintegrates. What's left? The cage around the driver, who's still living. All that dissapation of energy helps. Hit that wall at 200mph in your non-crumpling 1962 Biscayne, and you and the dash will be one.
Outside of the fact that the gun would absorb less energy and kick a lot more, why would a lighter .357 be a bad thing?
Keep Austin Weird!
The real reason is that not only is DU extremely dense, it is also pyrophoric. Get it hot enough (let's say by slamming it through the armor plating of a tank) and it'll combust in air. Nothing is worse inside a tank than to raise the temperature so high that the tank's ammo magazine (full of gun powder) spontaneously combusts. This is why the turret will pop off a tank hit by a fin-stabilized DU penetrator.... the unfired rounds explode in the intense heat, blowing the top right off the tank.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Commercial Use.... a High-End Apple Laptop Case "It just works... but some people like fixing code."
Wow, pop under ads and casino ads. Is MSNBC going out of business?
And IBM and Unisys bought a pop under ad. What could they be thinking? Has their marketing department lost what little brainpower it had?
Mod parent down, it's inane... this company is at no more risk than any other company that provides parts for aircraft etc. Anyways, contracts and lawyers manage to keep down liability when something does go wrong.
" a new alloy that is stronger than steel and titanium"
By mass or by volume? Stronger with reguards to tension, compression, or shear? Or some combination?
Heck, I can think of a building material that is more easily molded than either of those two metals and is actually stronger in many ways. It's called concrete. Just don't try to put it under tension or shear...
Brilliant. £2750 for a new powerbook and now it's as good as tin.
'Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.' - George Gordon
"For all its promise, Liquidmetal is still largely untried, which is why the company is concentrating on industries where there is a readiness to explore the new."
Attention Trekkies: Mr. Scott's "Transparent Aluminum" A Reality. [cool]
America - a landmass often mistaken for a country
According to whom?
Someone from the United States, when abroad and asked where they're from, will reply "The United States"
Someone from a country other than the United States (European and African countries most notably), when confirming someones nationality, will ask if they're "From America", referring to the United States.
Don't even try to pull that crap, I've seen it enough to know.
Fe is the symbol for iron (Ferrium), which isn't particularly "strong" by itself. Steel is much stronger and is a mix of iron with other metals.
Titanium (Ti) is a single-element metal, however.
-m
We could also make the car out of carbon fiber.
Big downside to this is cost, and they already use the flakes or ribbons of "liquid metal" in composite materials.
Would you pour Clorox on your french fries?
I thought that's how they made poutine.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
"Liquidmetal Technologies' first product was golf club heads, because of another exotic property of the metal: it transfers more of the club's energy to the ball than steel or titanium, at least in theory.
transfers energy well? as in kenetic energy?? the same kind a cell phone gains as it is dropped? and they want to make CELL PHONE CASES out of the stuff??
what good is this for cell phone cases if it doesn't break when you drop it, but garuntees the death of the LC Display inside it???
moox. for a new generation.
It is nice to think you want you vehicle or frame to bust right through the rock or brick wall you hit. But, it is not going to happen.
If you want a "frame" tough enough to not "give and take" then you are as good as hitting the rock or brick wall with you birthday suit.
You are dead.
All you have done is changed the color hue of the object you have hit.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
This will finally solve my problem of break all my cell phones like once a month habbit.. you know those crappy face plate causes a fortune if you chance it as frequenly as i do??
Materials which are used in critical applications, surgical stainless steel for example, come with certs. If an instrument breaks off inside a patient due to flawed material, the company which provided the cert would be at least partially liable.
And just because you disagree with a statement doesn't make it inane.
on the bright side, my hosts file blocks virtually of it. Then, a hosts file with almost 15k entries should block damn near everything ad related. :) See www.smartin-designs.com/hosts_info.htm for more info
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Metallic glasses (trademark MetGlass) were invented over 30 years ago by AlliedSignal researchers and have been used for a wide range of industrial applications since. It is particularly important because of magnetic properties in transformers etc. I was with Allied when they first looked at the razor blade application - the razor companies didn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole because the blades were so durable that you would only need one a year.
BTW, the original patents have long ago expired so that anyone can work with metallic glasses.
What this guy did was develop an alloy that could be cooled into parts of thicker cross section than was previously possible.
This would be great for bicycle frames, especially if it can be more easily handled than titanium.
My hope is that it means that I can go really fast without losing weight. Because, as we all know, getting a really light bicycle means that one can be as fat as one likes and go fast.
Best wishes, Bob... is what I'm waiting for.
Don't ask questions, just go to your local library. Love this and then read this
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Does it make pancakes?
Armor piercing is great for some applications. Most anti-personell weapons, however, don't want armor piercing. An armor piercing round from even a moderate velocity weapon will go all the way through a human, doing relatively minimal damage. If you want to cause damage, what you want are soft bullets that expand when they hit soft stuff. If they expand, they do more damage, and cavitation effects are worse. This is why hollow points exist. This is why bullets are made of lead, not steel. You're better off if you're hit with an armor piercing round.
Nato 5.56mm rounds (M-16 rounds, .22 cal) are designed to tumble very early. They do a massive amount of damage for a small round, because they are designed to tumble very early upon hitting the body, split in two, and produce some massive cavitation. Despite this, the 5.56 doesn't kill as fast as the 7.62 used by the M1 Garand or the AK-47. This is on purpose. The US small arms tactic is to prefer wounding over killing. This isn't because of some noble humanitarian ideal; the military figured out that one wounded soldier takes three other soldiers out of combat just to take care of the 1 wounded person. Wounded people are much more expensive to take care of than dead people.
In any case, all other things being equal, you'd be better off getting hit by a Liquid Metal bullet than most of the other options. You'd have a better chance of surviving, if you got to a hospital.
Is it strong enough to handle the slash-dot effect?
Table-ized A.I.
Read Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down for a good account of NATO SS109 ammunition (5.56mm semi-armor-piercing) used against human beings. At short ranges, such as the Rangers had in Mogadishu, the rounds punch very small, clean holes in targets--there were many incidents where an AK-wielding Somali had to be hit five or six times with SS109 before he was incapacitated, compared to the one-shot-anywhere-in-the-body that the Delta Force snipers enjoyed with their 7.62mm rifles.
In the military, "field expedient" is slang for "ugly hack that works surprisingly well". That said... during WW1 and WW2, the German armed forces didn't have anywhere near enough heavy machineguns to take on tanks. So the infantry made field expedient antitank rifles by taking 8mm ammunition (a very powerful round--at the turn of the century some people used them to hunt elephants), removing the bullet and then reseating the bullet, reversed, so that the blunt face would strike first. It gave the bullet the same effect as a metal die-punch; it punched neat, clean holes in steel.
Moral of the story: "pointiness" has never been a major issue with armor-piercing ammo. It's all about the sectional density.
... In the 70s, cops were beginning to discover that their service revolvers were generally pretty lousy pieces of kit. Most departments issued .38s, which are pretty anemic--many departments were still using .32 revolvers.
.38 Special service bullet would not get through the car door. And with any degree of obliquity, it bounced off the windshield. [Police] Lieutenant Turcus, Don Ward and I thought maybe we could design a bullet which would get through the car door, and get through the windshield and get the crook out of the car ..."
Some cops were complaining that they had pretty much no penetration. This caused some problems--well, hey. The inventor can say it better than I can.
Dr. Paul Kopsch, in a 1990 interview: "There were a couple gunfights, police versus criminal, here in Lorraine County[, Ohio]. The ordinary
Those three men--Kopsch, Turcus and Ward--invented an armor-piercing handgun cartridge, which they called the KTW (after their initials). The KTW was a bullet made of steel. When a normal lead bullet hits something, it'll deform and expend a lot of its energy as a result. Steel doesn't deform, and that lets it rip through cover easily.
Unfortunately, the bullet was so hard that firing it would destroy the barrel of the gun. Lead is soft enough to not damage the barrel; firing steel bullets will ruin a barrel. So in order to protect the barrel from damage, the KTW bullet was then clad in a light Teflon coating.
I've seen KTWs for sale at gun shows, but I think most of the KTWs on the market today are hoaxes. The KTW was never produced in large quantities and was only sold to military and law-enforcement arsenals--never to private citizens, nor was it ever sold directly to cops. The "KTWs" I've seen have been pretty shabby-looking things that the seller wanted $20 a round for, and promised that "of course it's real, don't you see the Teflon?"
Depleted uranium shells are responsible for environmental damage and health problems for soldiers. Replacing uranium with Liquid Metal would be a very good use for it, and would justify he hype somewhat.
I assume the reason why liquid metal would be a good replacement for depleted Uranium is that because it has no grains, it is particularly pyrophoric, i.e. will spontaneously burn when exposed to air.
Actually, given the fact that Liquidmetal does melt at 750 degrees F., I think Formula 1 teams are not interested for the reasons of fire safety and also because the high temperatures from the engine and brakes could seriously weaken the metal.
This is why F1 cars use mostly carbon fiber composites for the body of the car; it offers very high strength and does not burn until at very high temperatures.
As far as I know, DU is superior to tungsten in AP rounds because it "shaves" off into a sharp(er) point when it starts to shatter. Tungsten will blunt and form a "mushroom".
So, high mass is great, pyrophoric quality is something of an overkil.. The fact that the shell point will stay sharp while it's penetrating the armor is really why it's such a good material for ammo.
I wonder how well would this metallic glass do in this application. The round heats up like crazy when it hits the target.. What's to keep it from behaving like a ice cream cone in a hot day?
Am I the only person who finds this a bit depressing?
Mithril! All folk desired it. It could be beaten like copper, and polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet harder than tempered steel. Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim.
The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Steels are designed for very specialised purposes. Cr-Mo steels typically make quite good kitchen knives but are lousy where shock/abrasion/heat resistance are required. In fact, there are several steel manufacturers who catalogue their products on varying scales of combinations of hardness, shock/heat/abrasion resistance by the addition of chromium, vanadium, manganese, phosphorus and/or a host of other elements and compounds.
He says in the byline "stronger then any man" so I guess he wants a stronger man if he can get him but if not then he'll take any man.
Before you roll out your "Spelling Nazi" replies, this isn't a spelling error. Taco and Hemos always use the word "then" when they mean "than" so it's a grammar error. Hell, everybody makes spelling errors. This is something different. It shows that slashdot is helmed by semiliterate authors who spew crap left and right. I wonder if timothy can stage a coup? I'll back him.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
"The first plans for the new alloy are to be used in golf clubs, baseball bats, skis, and cell phone covers."
Are these the best uses they could think of? What are people doing with their cell phones that require a super-alloy anyway? Reentering the earth's atmosphere while making a call?
If you feel the need for super-alloy bat/club/skis maybe you should spend the money on lessons instead.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
She was found to have committed accounting fraud on the company's quarterly revenue report and is now in jail sharing a cell with a woman from Worldcomm.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Just like diamond, however, if you get it hot you lose all of the wonderful properties. The same holds for the aluminium alloys that are used in aircraft, and that hasn't been a problem for nearly a century.