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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."
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.
Won't work- it loses it's strength when subjected to heat.
Unless you're hinting that she's frigid...
Rearden Metal anyone? Better, stronger, lighter, faster, slices, dices, washs the car but held down by The Man.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
As they say in the article it isn't anything new. They just make it a bit thicker, why is this even news?
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.
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.
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
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.
The alloy contains beryllium, a particularly toxic metal, requiring special handling.
Does this make this alloy hazardous as well?
The big deal in auto safety isn't in getting the vehicle to withstand a violent impact. It's in making it more likely that the passengers will survive such an impact. Ever hear of 'crumple zones'? The idea there is to sacrifice the vehicle, getting it to absorb much of the energy of the impact, in order to improve the passenger's chances of survival.
Would you want to buy a car that would come away from a head-on collision with only minor damage to the vehicle itself, but that would leave the driver splattered all over the interior?
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
- You don't want a car to withstand a front end collision. Even if cars could be made indestructible, they wouldn't be. Havn't you ever heard of a crumple zone? You want the car to decelerate as slowly as possible, which mean crushing as much as possible.
Bull Fucking ShitYou know those commercials where the car hits the brick wall and they show how well the car 'crumples' up as a safety feature?
I hate those.
If I hit a brick wall, I WANT TO KEEP ON GOING RIGHT ON THROUGH fuck the brick wall and fuck crumpling up like a wuss, the *brick wall* can
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
s/brick wall/highway divider/g;
Get it now?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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
I wouldn't trust it for aircraft.... The metal starts to weaken at only 750 degrees F. I'm not sure how hot the exterior of a plane gets from the air friction, but I wouldn't want to push my luck.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Cars don't withstand head-on collisions for a reason. They crumple to soften the blow for passengers. Here's why:
.0254 m
.0254 m) = -14162 m/s^2
Let's take a 60 mph head-on collision with something massive enough that it doesn't move when the car hits it. Assuming that the car doesn't deform at all, the passengers will have to go from 60 mph to 0 in the distance of about an inch (liberal estimate for seat belt play and expansion).
'scuse me while I whip this [physics book] out:
v^2 = v0^2 + 2*a (x - x0)
Solve for a:
(v0^2-v^2)/(2*(x-x0))
v0 = 60 mph -> 26.8224 m/s
v = 0 mph -> 0 m/s
x = 0 in -> 0 m
x0 = i in ->
(26.8224 m/s ^ 2 - 0) / (2*(0 m -
(14162 m/s^2) / (9.8 m/s^2) = 1445 G's.
If you were unlucky enough to be in this car, you wouldn't just die. You would splash. I friend of mine just informed me that the tensile strength of a seatbelt is 15 tons, and a 150 lb person would exert 108 tons on the seatbelt and splash into the dashboard or steering wheel.
Moral of the story: if they ever do make a car that stiff, don't ever get in it.
Liquid metal and random walkers in one day... kinda like Terminator2? or maybe Cartman's trapper keeper...
It might be useful for structural parts of a subsonic airliner that is not near the jet engines, like the fuselage.
Hmmm--imagine a 777 weighing 10-15% less than now--we could get a lot more range out of a 777.
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.
I thought the address you posted was a joke, but Google produces too many results so I guess it's true. However it does sound like the plot for a horror novel. Ever seen what spiders do to each other?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
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.
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.
They're called SUVs.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
So you can continue into the building killing people sitting at their desks while you drive straight through the office?
I'd rather visit you in the hospital, while you consider your driving skills, thanks.
"Old man yells at systemd"
In this case I stand corrected.
hand weapons != rifles
Not that I have ever seen a real firearm in my life except in the holster of a police officer ... I am not in the United States* or in the Middle East or hundreds of other countries where people have to carry firearms around for personal safety. In that respect I consider myself highly fortunate.
*N.B. I am aware that in the USA the right to bear arms is a right provided for protection of the principles of the constitution, not protection of one self.
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."
I certainly hope she doesn't get up to 750 degrees... would make sex a little painful.
It's not a joke, quite widely publicized. All it does is make the goats' udders produce silk proteins in their milk, it's not like they grow fangs and start spinning webs. The milk still has to be processed and the proteins spun, and the goats look and act exactly like regular ones.
The WTC didn't collapse either. The steel columns in the center melted in the fire, weakening the above floors and causing them to collapse - thus the floor-by-floor collapse everyone's seen on TV.
This stuff melts at less than 1/2 the temperature - the WTC would have gone down in minutes, not hours.
" 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...
Actually, crumple zones are good for high impact, but for little fender benders, a crumpled car is a high cost to the person. Fenders are not even fenders any more, they are cheap pieces of plastic, that scratch and dent, and costs too much money to replace. Something about an old truck with re-enforced steel tubing makes more sense in this pass the buck, let insurance handle it world..
-
lets remove all the warning labels, and let nature weed out the idiots.
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.
Just remember, this drivers rarely hit walls straight on; if they did, the driver would very likely die from his brain sloshing about in his skull, among other nasty things that happen at extremely high G's. Saying that they hit the walls at 200 mph is a little misleading, since the their velocity in the direction perpendicular to the wall is much less.
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.
Titanium (Ti) is a single-element metal, however.
Alloying titanium with vanadium and aluminum will dramatically increase it's strength.
It's far too brittle to be a pistol material...
as a Materials Scientist I flinch when it is said a material is stronger than another simply because strength can be measured in so many ways, and physical strength has components which are often inversely proportinal - e.g. toughness (ability to remain useful through fatigue and past the yeild strength) v.s. hardness.
this is harder than most metals, and has a higher yield strength, but zero ductility and probably really poor fatigue properties. Imagine a glass pistol... *shivers*
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!
I don't think it's flexible enough for most parts of the aircraft, nor is it heat-resistant enough for the engines.
It would maybe be useful in seat mounts, or cockpit construction (levers and stuff.)
The real savings would be if you could make the fuselage and wings out of lighter material, but I bet this material doesn't have the right elastic properties to take up the role.
The website claims (via graphs) that it can, though.
It's way expensive if it can.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
This is what happens when people get their firearm knowledge from video games.
.50 cal. machine gun has firing tables and can be indirectly fired, so maybe that could count. :)
Or from the liberal media, public education, or any other source that doesn't have a clue about firearms.
Oh, some mortars (60 mm and smaller) are generally considered "small arms" by the military. (I was an armorer in the U.S. Army). Mortars, of course, have smooth bores as well.
No man-portable howitzers, though. A shame, really. Well, the M2
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I meant to add: It takes at least two people to carry a full M2 setup (with tripod) around, though.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
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, BobArmor 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?"
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.
Actually, the idea of crumple zones on passenger automobiles came from racing cars.
I'm sure you've seen the spectacular wrecks on Indy cars or NASCAR racers; the spectacular ripping away of body parts on the current IRL or CART racer or the heavy crumpling of metal on a NASCAR racer during a wreck essentially dissipates energy away from the driver. This is why the owner of Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, NC proposed the idea of the Humpy Bumper--a structure on front of a NASCAR racer that provides extra energy dissipation in addition to the entire front hood crumpling in case the car runs into the wall at high speed.
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?
I think Americans are compensating by becoming 15% heavier themselves.
How 'bout crashing into something of the same mass but opposite velocity? You come to a complete stop, and so does it.
With regard to getting rear ended...it depends on how fast the car is going and various other factors, but to give you an idea, here are a couple of pictures from a 45 mph rear ending. I was stationary at the beginning of this, the other driver was a moron.
Pic 1
Pic 2
My seat was twisted about 30 degrees on the Y axis and my headrest was twisted about 45 degrees on the X axis. I suffered pretty major spinal injuries from this wreck. Just think how fun it would have been if the back of the car hadn't crumpled so much.
My car's original position was behind the white car in the second picture. The crumpling of my car gave the rest of the car time enough to accelerate and not snap my neck like a twig. That was a good car.
Sure, but for that you need to be in something with a *shitload* of inertia. Say, a Challenger tank. It's not impossible, and you can get a license to drive one on the road, but I sure as hell wouldn't want the fuel bills! (I believe it's measured in gallons per mile!)
And even then, you're not guaranteed to make it. Tank vs car, tank wins. Tank vs low wall, tank wins. Tank vs bridge support, bridge support wins, everyone inside the tank is plated round the walls. Oops. Bottom line is that most accidents out of metro areas involve one vehicle stacking it into the scenery, and the scenery (cliffs, large trees, big rocks, rivers) is usually pretty immovable, regardless of the size of the vehicle.
Grab.
How often? Umm, *very* often!
Getting rear-ended is about the worst scenario in compact cars, and even more so in one made of some ultimately stiff material. Compact cars don't have much of a rear area to crumple, so they don't collapse much from the rear so that the main compartment stays intact. The result is that in a rear-end collision, a large part of the push goes into propelling the front car forward. Your head isn't pushed directly, so it stays around a bit whilst the rest of your body shoots forward. Result - your neck bends backwards over your seatback, causing whiplash injuries (most ppl don't have their headrests set properly, and headrests aren't that successful anyway). My mom still has neck pains 30 years after a rear-end collision.
Now imagine what would happen if you got rear-ended in a car which put 100% of the impact into propelling your car forward, instead of only maybe 50%. Maybe your car would be intact with minor scratches, but your neck would be snapped like a twig. Good call man...
Grab.
Yes, and those "certain speeds" are fighting speeds. On average, the pilot flying the best-reacting plane wins. Except that now planes don't have to be aerodynamically stable any more (eg. Eurofighter Typhoon, F-22) the pilot is becoming more and more the limiting factor, hence the drive for remote-piloted planes. The first remote-piloted plane will kick everything else's butt, simply bcos the remote pilot can send it into manoevers which no conventional pilot could withstand.
Grab.
"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
Since it is brittle wouldn't this fe-ti alloy just shatter when hitting a hard surface? It would be like using a ceramic bullet.
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.