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Transparent Aluminum Is Here
Alien54 writes "Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. (link includes a picture of samples) Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a "flame-spray" technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides (see also: A Rosenflanz et al. 2004 Nature 430 761). Scotty would be pleased."
Glass breakthrough
11 August 2004
Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a "flame-spray" technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides (A Rosenflanz et al. 2004 Nature 430 761).
Glass is formed when a molten material is cooled so quickly that its constituent atoms do not have time to align themselves into an ordered lattice. However, it is difficult to make glasses from most materials because they need to be cooled -- or quenched -- at rates of up to 10 million degrees per second.
Silica is widely used in glass-making because the quenching rates are much lower, but researchers would like to make glass from alumina as well because of its superior mechanical and optical properties. Alumina can form glass if it is alloyed with calcium or rare-earth oxides, but the required quenching rate can be as high as 1000 degrees per second, which makes it difficult to produce bulk quantities.
Rosenflanz and colleagues started by mixing around 80 mole % of powdered alumina with various rare-earth oxide powders -- including lanthanum, gadolinium and yttrium oxides. Next, they fed the powders into a high-temperature hydrogen-oxygen flame to produce molten particles that were then quenched in water. The resulting glass beads, which were less than 140 microns across, were then heat-treated -- or sintered -- at around 1000C. This produced bulk glass samples in which nanocrystalline alumina-rich phases were dispersed throughout a glassy matrix. The new method avoids the need to apply pressures of 1 gigapascal or more, as is required in existing techniques.
Click to enlarge
Aluminate glasses
The 3M scientists characterised the glasses using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and thermal analysis, and tested the strength of the materials with hardness and fracture toughness tests. They found that their samples were much harder than conventional silica-based glasses and were almost as hard as pure polycrystalline alumina.
Moreover, over 95% of the glasses were transparent (see figure) and had attractive optical properties. For example, fully crystallized alumina-rare earth oxide ceramics showed high refractive indices if the grains were kept below a certain size.
Author
Belle Dumé is Science Writer at PhysicsWeb
Aren't many jewels aluminum compounds?t s/13.html
google search of rubies and aluminum:
http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elemen
Alumina (aluminium oxide) is not the same as aluminium, that's like saying that water ice(hydrogen oxide) is 'Transparent Hydrogen'.
Alumina or corundum as the natural material is known, is found in nature as a clear mineral - different colour variations give you Ruby and Sapphire.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
If I remember correctly, they did not need the clear aluminum but they did need something to store the whale in. Since they did not have any money they traded the formula for clear aluminum for the whale tank.
Well, alumina has almost none of the same properties as aluminium (since you're from the UK too, I'll spell that word correctly from now on). It's extremely tough (used in drilling bits), non-conductive and non-reactive. One would expect something described as "Transparent Aluminium" to behave a bit like Aluminium. Alumina doesn't.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
He traded the formula of Transparent Aluminum for sufficiently strong plexiglass for the tank.
Why not link to the article on transparent alumina as well? Though it needs a slight update, mind you.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
A common misconception caused by the old "spun" method of making glass which makes sheets which are thicker at the bottom than the top. People have often assumed that old glass has "flowed" into that shape. It hasn't: it was made that way. Glass does not in fact flow, not even slowly.
Search on Google for "glass flow" for lots and lots of stuff about this.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Pure aluminum is a metal. Aluminum oxide is not - it's like the difference between hydrogen and water.
As I understand it, pure metals can't be transparent because light is an electromagnetic wave which gets "short-circuited" by conductive materials. Presumably the oxides disrupt this conductivity. And anyway, the alumina is combined with other oxides before being used to form glass.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Is nothing new - it's called corundum or as you more probably know it, sapphire (or ruby when it is red).
And hard is only one part of the story. Glass is hard, yet I wouldn't want to make structural elements of an aircraft from large hunks of glass... Aluminum is light and Tough (high energy to break). It is also ductile (deforms before breaking) something that no ceramic is...
So, while this is cool, and will probably be used for super scratch proof layers on spyplane camera transparencies or something like that where they can afford something like this, it isn't what you think it is.
As an aside, translucent alumina is used in something you see everyday - sodium vapor lamps use alumina to encapsulate the sodium metal that they use as their filament.
+++ ATH0 +++
There is some debate, the scientific consensus at the moment is that (ordinary) glass is NOT a liquid. Wikipedia has some interesting background info on this discussion.
In general, the composition of glass makes a huge different in properties such as hardness, inertness, transparancy and color. In ordinary glass, CaO is added to lower solubility in water and various other solvents.
Glass may flow, but it does so very very very slowly. As in "age of the entire universe" slowly.
No, it makes the term "transparent alumina" valid. The term 'Aluminum' refers to an element, whereas alumina refers to a compound of aluminum. If you refer to the properties of aluminum (or aluminium, if it makes this easier for you), you are (or at least will be understood by others to be) referring to the properties of a quantity of essentially pure aluminum, which is transparent under no condition.
Therefore, the term "transparent aluminum" is incorrect. Sorry.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Take a metal, and cool it off very rapidly, and it becomes very hard but also very brittle. Cool if off fast enough apparantly, before the atoms have a chance to properly align themselves, and it becomes transparent, which is what happens with Silica to make glass. They just found a way to cool off Alumina fast enough. Problem is, what gives metal its characteristics are the very nice, orderly arrangement of atoms bonded in sheets, so that it can remain strong while also bending before breaking.
I don't think this is anything other than a cool way to make glass out of something else, perhaps something stronger, but nowhere near as cool as a material resulting in clear body panels on a car, or clear coke cans.
Seems a couple other people beat me to rebuking this, but I figured I'd throw another link in just in case there is any lingering doubt.
Glass is not a liquid. Glass is an amorphous solid.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Since the NCC-1701(A) was a Battlecruiser, unlike all the other Enterprises, it is possible they just felt that CRTs were a more battle-hardened technology than LCDs.
Welp, I guess that's it, I'm officially a Star Trek Continuity Apologist. *sigh*
Random and weird software I've written.
Transparent Aluminum Is Here
NO IT ISN'T! Commercially developed transparent Alumina (think clear ruby/sapphire) is here, HUGE difference. Sorry Trek fans, you will have to wait longer. There will be no clear planes, no clear cases made of Alumina. If cases were transparent Alumina then they would have the same properties as silica glass and you would have a nice greenhouse effect going on slowly (or not so slowly) frying your computer.
Alumina is a mineral/glass/ceramic, Aluminum is a metal!
It's called an Alcubierre Drive. You can finish yourself off now.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Well, Hydrogen in gaseous and liquid forms already is transparent... but there's another form of hydrogen that is silvery and opaque: Metallic Hydrogen which can exist under extreme pressures such as the core of Jupiter and Saturn. It is theorized that metallic hydrogen would look a lot like molten lithium, perhaps even a lighter silver, almost white, if you could view it.
Yes, except for tense. We have already been making synthetic rubies and blue sapphires under laboratory conditions for at least 50 years now. Google for "synthetic ruby" if you dare.
Who is John Cabal?
From the article in Nature:
Similarly, when the grain size is maintained below the scattering limit, the fully crystallized Al[2]O[3] REO ceramics exhibit attractive optical characteristics including high refractive index (1.8 and higher) and transparency through the mid-infrared range.
Cool. Finally something to tackle the 1.8 barrier, and smaller glasses for me. 8-)
As I remember, the first laser was made from a ruby rod, which is a form of aluminum oxide.
Sure it's been said but bears repeating.
If you have a high quality watch it is likely that the crystal is made from polycrystalline alumina (i.e. corundum...in this case synthetic corundum). The alumina glass is different however in the fact that it is a glass and therefore lacks crystal structure.
Since it doesn't have to be crystallized it is likely that it will be able to be produced in large sizes. However, being a glass it is not going to have the malleable properties of aluminum metal and will probably shatter if hit hard enough.
One atmosphere = 1 bar = 780 torr/mm mercury = 101.3 kilopascals.
Hence 1GPa is about 10000 atmospheres.
These kinds of pressures are not (too) difficult for research labs but industry goes all queasy above about 500 as these pressures don't scale well.
Sick of WoW? Try the thinking man's MMORPG: EVE Online
That's a 'V', not a 'W'. Moscow is really "Moskvá'. "Moscow" is sort of an incorrect transliteration we use. The reason for the name is that Moscow is next to the "Moskva" river. Wikipedia has more info.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sort of....
A better way of explaining it would be that for a photon to be absorbed by an electron, there must be an empty higher energy state for the electron to move to (E = Eo + hv, where Eo is the energy state of the electron and hv is the energy of the photon). In solids with metallic bonding, there are many electrons floating around and many free electronic states for them to move to, so any photon that enters the solid can be absorbed by an electron that will then jump to a higher energy state (which will be free, because there are so many free energy states).
In the case of insulating and semiconducting materials, there is a gap in the energy states, so some transitions are not allowed. For pure, single crystal Al2O3, (aka white sapphire), there are (essentially) no transitions available that correspond to the energy of photons of visible light. If you start substituting in Cr3+ ions for the Al3+ ions, your sapphire will turn red and we call it "ruby". In this case, the Cr impurities provide transitions that can absorb wide ranges of visible light, but not red light. What is more is (if this is fairly pure), the ruby will not only absorb light of other wavelengths, but it will emit red light as well. Try putting a synthetic ruby under a UV light, it will glow red.
However, it should be noted that other defects can scatter and absorb light as well. Grain boundaries, voids, inclusions, etc. will affect your light transmittance. It has been possible for some time now to make polycrystalline alumina that is translucent (Lucalox), but polycrystalline alumina can never be transparant, so there are two ways to make alumina transparant: make it single crystal (only one grain, so no grain boundaries) or amorphous (no grain boundaries, because there is no long range crystal order).
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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Tinfoill hat are made of tin.
Like, duh!
Unfortunately, you're overlooking the fact that tinfoil is made from alumin[i]um.
This is largely because it is frequently used in food storage and preparation, and tin is poisonous, so isn't a good choice.
In the south, tea is supposed to be cold and sweetened. I don't drink tea, but everyone else here drinks the hell out of it.
-B
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Be patient, QuickTime movie takes a while to load.
This news should not be surprising to anyone, since it's essentially a dupe! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/2 0/0358206&tid=126&tid=14
The amusing thing, is that American scientists are given credit here, but if you look at the original article from 2+1/2 years ago, it was the Germans who discovered it. Hmmm...
You could argue that this article is just a 'refinement' of the previous article. I could believe that only if a link had been provided to the original article. Ah well... Odd that the article itself doesn't mention previous work by the Germans either...
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Eyeglasses are an obvious application. This stuff should be both harder and stronger than silica glass.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This news should not be surprising to anyone, since it's essentially a dupe! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/2 0/0358206&tid=126&tid=14 [slashdot.org]
The amusing thing, is that American scientists are given credit here, but if you look at the original article from 2+1/2 years ago, it was the Germans who discovered it. Hmmm...
You could argue that this article is just a 'refinement' of the previous article. I could believe that only if a link had been provided to the original article. Ah well... Odd that the article itself doesn't mention previous work by the Germans either...
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
An indestructible CD? The *AAs would hate that, and would never use them. People buying replacements for scratched and broken discs are a big market for them!
Oh, and no, you're still not entitled to make a backup, peasant!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
In the name of The Great Bird, go thou and buy this month's Maxim magazine (US version). Thy wishes are fulfilled. Jolene wants us to take a peek.
You're partially correct. They needed something *light* and *strong* to compensate for the mass of the whales and water. Transparent aluminum was the only material that would satisfy those requirements. I think they said that to use steel or glass, the tank walls would have been far too thick.
scotty asked for plexiglass that was 60 feet by ten feet and able to withstand the pressure of 18,000 cubic feet of water. To which the plexicorp guy replied "thats easy, 6 inches"
I'd like my super geek medal now please.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
At some point in the first season, there's a whole scene about Picard trying to get a decent cup of tea from the replicator. The 'hot' bit is *very* critical.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Take a metal, and cool it off very rapidly, and it becomes very hard but also very brittle. Cool if off fast enough apparantly, before the atoms have a chance to properly align themselves, and it becomes transparent, which is what happens with Silica to make glass. They just found a way to cool off Alumina fast enough.
I'm a jeweler and metalworker. Metal phase transitions are my speciality.
First off let me say that neither silica nor alumina is a metal; they are (respectively) the oxides of silicon and aluminum. Metals have mostly empty outer shells which is what causes their impressive conductivity, hardness, and quite a few other properties.
The oxide of a metal has its outer electron shells completely filled; it is no longer metallic in any way.
However you are right in that the quenching is key. The important part is to cool it off quicker than crystals form. A crystal structure is like an electromagnetic net, allowing the material to catch photons. No crystals, no net.
Actually, each crystal is more like a filter; crystals typically are polarized in special ways. If you have lots of small crystals throughout a material (star rubies are like this), then each one only lets some of the light through; the more layers you have, the less light gets through. Enough of them and absolutely zero photons can make it through the set of polarization filters.
Oh and regards metal heating...
Metals form grains in their solid state; small areas of material that are atomically aligned, similarly to a crystal. When a metal splits or bends, it tends to split or bend on grain boundaries.
A material with large grains tends to be hard but brittle; a force large enough to break the grain boundaries tends to cleave it straight through. We call this state "tempered" A material with small grains tends to be soft and flexible; it can bend without breaking. We call this state "annealed"
Most materials will work harden; as you bend and flex the material, grains tend to aggregate together as the opportunity arises. Take a sheet of dead soft copper and start bending it back and forth; it'll quickly become hard on the bend line, then snap in two. You could probably do the same with a paper clip if you have one handy.
When you heat up a material, you add kinetic energy and dissolve the grains. If you quench it rapidly, it'll stay in this small-grained state. If you quench before it gets that hot, you'll lock it into a large-grained state... the grains actually grow as you heat it, because you're adding kinetic energy enabling the atoms to adhere to the grains. Most metals have a particular temperature where the grains are the largest, after which they rapidly dissolve.
Jewelers know not the temperatures but the colors. If I make a steel tool and I want to temper it I heat it until straw-yellow, then quench it. If I want to anneal it, I hold it at cherry red for ten minutes then quench it. With silver, the temper heat is in the infrared and the anneal heat is dull red.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Uh, I'm going to play Star Trek nerd here and correct you.
Scotty and McCoy went to a plant that manufactored plexiglass because plexiglass was strong enough to hold the water and whales they needed if it were thick enough. (There's one part of the movie where Scotty calculates how thick the plexiglass needs to be to finish building their tank.) Since they had no money, they couldn't pay for the plexiglass needed so instead Scotty drew up a formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for the plexiglass. Even with the formula, it would take that plant years and years to be reconfigured to produce transparent aluminum, and they say so in the movie.
So... yes. Grandparent is right; they traded the formula for the plexiglass.
Comment of the year
A more likely reason for the confusion is that Russian has several sounds which English does not.
I think you meant English has several sounds not present in Russian, based upon the example given.
Russian has no consonants to depict the sounds presented by the English letters "j", "qu", "x" and "w". English does in fact have the "zh" sounds. It's just not represented by a single letter. Pronounce "vision".
Russian can approximate all three of these letter using their own alphabet.
x = ks (ax = aks)
j = dzh (jeans = dzheens)
qu = koo + vowel (queer = kooeer)
w = oo + vowel (whale = ooayl)
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
You forget water is more then just hydrogen..
And the idea of a ruby being transparent aluminum + some coloring also fits the bill for the sought after properties.. Its one of the hardest known substances known to man..
its also reproducible in the lab.. perhaps not in 'sheet' form, but it would have been a good starting point for research into a practical method of mass production.
Even if you were correct, and water was just hydrogen, that's still a far stretch, while my example is pretty damned close to the desired material..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I remember reading about this years ago....
m
Heres an article that has a link to one of the original article i read http://www.rense.com/general20/transparentalum.ht
Did zi germans invent first?
Not quite true. Harold Warp did invent Flex-O-Glass, and there is a Harold Warp Memorial Drive. But his last name is a coincidence. Warp has meant to twist or bend something for hundreds of years. It originates from the old english word "weorpan". In 1346 it was used as a weaving term. (When weaving, you start with lengthwise threads, the "Warp" and weave the "Woof" perpendicularly across it). In 1440 the word Warp was first recorded as meaning to twist out of shape.
This is not the only coincidental last name. I'm sure many are familar with the inventor of the ball and suction device, still used in toilets today. His name was Thomas Crapper, but "crap", meaning defication, had been slang for at least 50 years before he invented the toilet. And it has meant general refuse for a great deal longer than that. The sirname Crapper originats in the 13th century, and is a variation of "Cropper", an occupation sirname, like Cartwright, Smith, and so on.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I'm not where I can get it, but I have the images from the original article, and the stuff they made back then was not very good optically. Not only have they figured out how to make lots of it, but their technique is better.
The picture in this article is kind of small but it looks like, even though some of the glass isn't perfectly transparent, it is still clear. Rather than being cloudy it is just colored. One looks like it would be great for tinted windows.
The old images are very cloudy and rough looking.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
Here are the scientist creating tranparent aluminum -
Creating Tranparent Aluminum
and here is the final product -
Tranparent Aluminum
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