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Amorphous Steel
pfdietz writes "Researchers at Oak Ridge have achieved a holy grail of materials science: they have figured out how to produce amorphous (glassy) steel. The material is reported to be twice as hard and have twice the tensile strength of the strongest ultra-high tensile strength steel alloy."
BTW, if you can't get a gmail invite from the poster above, they are giving one away periodically from the bottom of this Google Compute page.
There are several special metals in the Marvel universe that can have a place in the World of Darkness. These metals are usually very hard; much harder than mere steel, and they are not very ablative. They are also very rare, in general. One or two of them have special properties.
Adamantium
Adamantium is the hardest metal known to man, though it has not been made clear how dense it is. One would suspect that its density is roughly the same as that of normal steel, though a Storyteller can rule that it is as heavy as lead or as light as magnesium. At any rate, it would appear that no force on earth is sufficient to break or bend adamantium when it is at a normal temperature. Wolverine has used his adamantium-coated claws in Arctic climes as well as steamy jungles, so there is no reason to suppose that the metal becomes brittle at low temperatures. Judging from the number of times Wolverine's flesh has been roasted or vaporized right off of his skeleton in the comics, with no visible effect on the metal, we must assume that adamantium has a relatively high melting point. In any case, to be nice to Logan, it also seems likely that it has a fairly high specific heat capacity, at least for a metal. It may or may not be one of the magnetic metals- as seen in X-Men 25- because Magneto has enough raw power to reach down and repel protons in the raw, if he wants to.
There is a special process that allows adamantium in ionic (salt) form to be bonded to human bones- as in Wolverine's skeleton- or even human skin- as in Cyber's case. This process was developed by a Japanese scientist and villain called Dark Wind, and stolen (or sold) for the benefit of Department H, a branch of the Canadian Ministry of Defense. The following characters have some sort of connection to the metal, or are actually running around wearing it: Wolverine, Cyber, Dark Wind, Apocalypse, the Professor (not Xavier), Ultron, Lady Deathstrike.
Carbonadium
Carbonadium is a resilient, unstable metal that is much tougher than steel but more flexible than adamantium. It would seem as though it is a difficult and extremely expensive process to make carbonadium, which is probably an alloy of some kind, since there is apparently only one carbonadium synthesizer in the entire world. Carbonadium, like its more resilient counterpart adamantium, would appear to have a high specific heat capacity and melting point.
Carbonadium may or may not have one unique property: it may serve to stabilize a life-force vampire's condition, which would keep the mutant from having to drain the life force of others to survive. This may be a simple fact of Omega Red's condition, rather than something general to life-force vampirism.
Omega Red's tentacles are composed of carbonadium, and it is possible that his skeleton is also laced with the stuff. Other characters with a link to carbonadium include Wolverine, Sabretooth, Maverick, and John Wraith.
Omnium
Omnium is an extremely hard, extremely rigid metal that is likely to be second in resilience only to adamantium. In any case, it would seem that it is even less likely to bend without snapping than that metal. Omnium is not a commonly used or mentioned metal, but it has appeared on rare occasion in Marvel comics.
There was an acolyte of Magneto that had the power to change either himself or another person into an aware omnium statue. Other characters that have been seen using or testing the metal include Penance and the White
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The article was a little thin, so I mosied on down to Wikipedia. I always get confused when I hear glassy, but it appears to be related to the material structure, not any transparency/translucency of the material.
Apparently amorphous metals are considered by some scientists to be a type of liquid rather than a solid. Kind of like glass, if you look at an old house you can see that the windows have slowly flowed downward.
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In any crystal, there are potential imperfection. The MatSci term for them is dislocations. These are holes in the crystal lattice. These holes can move around (think of piles of marbles). In single crystals, these dislocations lead to stress risers at the hole (try tearing a sheet of paper by just pulling at opposite ends...then tear a small notch in the middle of one edge and try again). So these dislocations can move around and basically "unzip" the whole crystal. The failure mode leads to "cleaving" planes along different directions in the crystal and makes the bulk strength much lower.
High strength alloys generally try to put extra chemicals in the metal mixture to block the movements of the dislocations. Also, you tend to "quench" the formed metal so that the crystals that it forms (called "grains") are small. Smaller grains usually means stronger metals because they can only "unzip" a short distance before they hit a different grain with a different orientation.
These guys at ORNL have basically taken the tiny grain idea to the ultimate limit. Each grain basically only has one or a few atoms in it. FYI, IAA Mech. Engineeer.
Instead of ninth posting, you might want to read.
"The researchers have produced centimeter-sized pieces of the amorphous steel, and they feel that structural steel in bulk metallic glass form can be produced economically with traditional drop-casting methods, in which metallic glasses are made by pouring the hot liquid into a cold copper mold."
Discover Magazine ran an interesting article on glassy metals back in their April issue, but to see the full article on-line you have to be a subscriber. However, if you can find someone who has a copy, it's a good read.
There's two aspects to the "strength" of steel, strength and toughness. Toughness describes the material's ability to withstand shock without permanent deformation, work hardening, et cetera. Strength describes the tensile strength, or how much weight it can hold.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"glassy", as in "amorphous", as in "non-crystalline". Does NOT mean transparent like window glass. Think obsidian - it's black (or green), opaque, and shatters in totally random directions. That's because it has no crystalline structure and thus no lines or planes of fracture.
This is non-crystalline steel. It's not transparent aluminum - but then, nothing is.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!