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Diamond-coated Steel
An anonymous reader writes "A Dutch chemist has successfully coated steel with a layer of diamond, opening the possibility for insanely strong tools that almost never wear out -- not to mention armor tough as, well, diamond-coated nails. From Science Blog."
This page has highly-magnified images of what this process does to steel. Here are direct links to the images:
Not wanted: graphite on tool steel
Wanted : a good-adhering diamond layer on tool steel with an intermediate layer of chromium nitride
well, they did mention that the initial use of chromium nitride was discarded specifically for that problem. they go on to mention that a surface treatment of boron causes the expansion coefficient to be much more similar to that of diamond, and that the effect fades as you get deeper down into the steel.
If you are in the business of 'stopping' something, you wouldn't really want diamond coated projectiles. When you fire a projectile at something, you want the energy of the projectile transferred to the object you are firing at. This means that you generally want your projectile to expand at impact. This also has the side effect of causing greater damage to the target, which is also sometimes an objective. A diamond coated projectile is going to tend to just pass on through, which is counter to both of the objectives.
I guess there might be some applications as far as armor piercing goes, but that is generally done by increasing caliber, which pretty much just adds energy to the projectile, hence its increased stopping power.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For armor piercing, lately the goal has been to keep the caliber down, and increase mass and/or hardness with depleted uranium or tungsten, which are very dense and harder than lead.
In the civilian area, teflon tipped bullets (so-called cop-killer) made a big splash a while back, but it was mostly anti-gun hype, they were designed for law enforcement use, and never available to the public. They were designed to penetrate things like car doors, not kevlar.
The teflon was actually mostly to prevent excess wear on the barrel of the gun, since the bullet was made almost entirely from brass. No cop has ever been killed by the bullets so named (As far as anyone can tell). I'd imagine a diamond coated bullet would tear up a barrel in short order, and would be totally impractical.
An interesting factoid regarding expansion: hollow and soft tipped bullets are mostly banned in engagements of war by the Hague Peace Conferences, which the US didn't technically sign on to, but they follow this part anyway. The Geneva convention also bans "weapons that cause superfluous injury". I guess the point of war is to maim, not to kill.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
One issue:
Diamonds aren't particularly strong; the only meaningful industrial aspect of them is that they're very, very hard.
Hardness != strength.
A diamond-coated fuel cell, I might surmise, would perform about as well at the application as the same fuel cell would without diamonds.
Kid-proof tablet..