The Incredible Shrinking Compound

MrByte420 writes "This Rueters article talks about everyone's household product of the future, zirconium tungstate. This unusuall metal actually shrinks when heated contrary to most other compounds. This property holds within a huge temperature range shrinks uniformly making it a very pratical substance to work with. The huge potential is already being explored in areas such as better Fiber Optics, Chips that don't burn out, better dental fillings, and racing cars."

Comments

ice shrinks

[agnosonga]

ya, ok its not a metal but ice shrinks when its heated

Re:ice shrinks

[jpt.d]

In this case the ice doesn't shrink, it melts. Conversion from one form to another. The metal doesn't do that, it maintains the same amount of material (assuming I read it correctly)

Re:ice shrinks

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

All of this will make your Fiance feel much better about the Zirconium - which you told her was a Diamond!

"Gosh honey, they even call 'em 'ice'..."

Slashback

[PhysicsGenius]

Be amazed all over again!

(I claim an extra 2 "Informatives" by reason that it was the same editor that posted this both times)

Re:Slashback

[HorsePunchKid]

Time for a meta article on "The Incredible Shrinking Attention Span". Oh wait... the editors are too afraid to post meta articles. All of the criticisms of this site would be on-topic, making it harder to use mod-bombing or IMP or whatever. *sigh* Wake up, editors. This stuff is getting old.

Article short on properties

[Deanasc]

The article is short on properties other then thermal contraction. If it generally behaves like a metal it may be drawn into a wire. Combined with resistive heating it could be used as a crude muscle. Unfortunately that Oxygen in the lattice leads me to believe it's very brittle in the same way that most oxides are, Iron Oxide comes to mind.

Still it may well find itself in nanostructures as a crude muscle where ductility is of less importance.

Re:Article short on properties

[Raiford]

Short on properties and confusing in application. Since the stuff is called Ziconium Tunstate then by definition it is an oxide and thereform must be processed by ceramic processing techniques. For example pressing, extruding, slip casting and finally sintering. I doubt that wires are something that is viable for this stuff. Microelectronic packaging is very likely since ceramics play a big role there. However much would depend on the dielectric properties of the material. Since it is a tungstate compound it most likely has a crystalline structure which has a fairly high defect density giving rise to some electronic conductivity.

I'm not quite clear on the reference to fiber optics. Where would the stuff go. It certainly would not make a good optical propagation medium since it is not isotropic and would have to be processed as a polycrystalline materail. There was a cryptic reference to gratings with no details so I guess there is the application but it escaped me.

Very Old News

[QuantumWeasel]

See for example the work at Bell Labs reporting in 1998 which was also reported in the journal Nature (subscription required) as early as 1997. The mechanism by which this broad negative-TCE occurs is nonetheless spectacular -- the zirconia atoms basically get pulled in and fold over against each other as the oxygen atoms vibrate more intensely with heating. This recent announcement (and several more in the last few years) are Soundbite Science.

Re:How bout cement?

[Vinum]

A lot of that is due to two reasons... long periods in the summer without rain cause the ground to shift and crack and it screws up roads and building foundations. That is why it is good to water your lawn frequently in the summer, to save your foundation in low rain areas.

Also... when water gets in the cracks between your sidewalk and freezes the ice expands and pushes the cracks further apart. This has devestating effects on roads and sidewalks. The only way to stop this on roads and sidewalks would be to remove the very thing that makes them useful... the rough surface on top ;)

Re:Mixing with other metals

[Raiford]

It could be mixed heterogenously to form a mechanical mixture with another metal. This would lower the effective thermal expansion of the mixture; however, these type of systems tend to degrade the mechanical properties. If the material were alloyed the crystal structure of the tunstate phase would be altered and the anomolous volumetric expansion would probably be lost.

Details?

[Debillitatus]

Ok, of course, the article was quite short on details. But does anyone out there know what the mechanism is in this metal that makes it contract when it heats? This seems to me counterintuitive, and I can't imagine how it works.

I also don't even know where to go for some technical literature, since I'm not a materials scientist.

Worst. Spelling. And. Grammar. Ever.

[fruity1983]

What is wrong with this guy?

"Rueters"??? ITS REUTERS!

"unusuall" . . . do I, need... ARGH!

Look at the grammar! This guy reads slashdot, and he hasn't passed grade 5 english?

"This property holds within a huge temperature range shrinks uniformly making it a very pratical substance to work with."

What is a 'temperature range shrinks'??? I cant even make sense out of this nonsenseness in order to make a sensical joke about the nonesenseness of this sentence!

Re:777?

[Valdrax]

Personally, I think of Kabbalah and numerology, but I guess I'm just weird for reading meaning into random numbers, aren't I?

Shrinky-dinks

[booch]

Come on. Any child of the 70s knows that there are things that shrink when heated.

Other sources...

[meridoc]

Here's a how-I-understand-it description:

The problem with wires is that they expand; the more heat/current passing through, the more expansion. If you're trying to propagate a wave through something that's slightly cone-shaped (rather than tubular), the wave will lose some of its integrity (it'll get larger rather than keeping its original shape). Also, if the wire gets smaller as you heat it (like using ZrW2O8 for the entire thing), the wave will be distorted (it'll get smaller and smaller).

Fiberoptics use a combination of materials: one that is essentially a traditional wire, and one that shrinks when heated. This produces an expansion in the normal stuff, and shrinks the other, creating a net expansion of zero! This way, the cable stays essentially the same size its entire length, and can propagate your signal with few distortions.

Substances that shrink when heated aren't new, and ZrW2O8 isn't new either. Here's a 1998 PDF from NIST on the stuff.

The first few pages of this nice PDF have a history of fiberoptics (the rest is an ad for the company).