New Material Harder Than Diamond

h4x0r-3l337 writes "Diamond is no longer the hardest substance known to man. Scientists have created a new material, called "aggregated diamond nanorods" by compressing carbon-60 under high heat. From the article: 'The hardness of a material is measured by its isothermal bulk modulus. Aggregated diamond nanorods have a modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared with 442 GPa for conventional diamond.'"

Comments

Possible uses?

[allanj]

OK, so obviously this could be used as "better-than-diamonds" for industrial purposes - grinding and such. But it seems to me that the improvement is only modest, and that this does not open up whole new frontiers of exciting materials - or am I completely wrong here? Is there some magical "limit" that was exceeded by this? If there *IS* a magical limit somewhere, what is it?

Re:Possible uses?

[bmo]

"OK, so obviously this could be used as "better-than-diamonds" for industrial purposes - grinding and such. But it seems to me that the improvement is only modest"

Uhm, don't underestimate the profit-increasing abilities of new materials.

Borazon, for example, is a synthetic material that is used in abrasives and cutting tools. The value isn't in the material itself, but in what one can do with it.

If it's about as expensive as synthetic diamond (an oxymoron - synthetic diamond is just as real as "real" diamonds) or borazon, expect this to wind up in concrete saws, grinding wheels, end mills, drills (masonry, metal, oil industry) and a whole zoo of tools.

It's not a "modest improvement". It's a technological leap comparable to synthesizing diamonds and superabrasives, which revolutionized a lot of industries.

--
BMO

Re:Possible uses?

[jericho4.0]

Maybe it's not a given that it would be good at the common industrial uses of diamonds. As it's formed from evenly sized tubes of carbon atoms, it might not Carry a strong, sharp edge, and that it might have a grain. I imagine the structure is pretty squished though, just like diamond, only with fewer flaws.

In some googling on this, I've become confused. "ultrahard fullerene" is C-60 buckyballs compressed at high temperature also. I see many different values quoted for UHF hardness and diamond. This Russian paper gives a value of 1 TPa in 1988!

What is it about carbon?

[mcrbids]

We're (laregly) made of carbon. Diamonds, the (formerly) hardest substance known to exist, is made of carbon. This new material is also made of carbon.

Carbon is also the basis for buckyballs, nanotubes, and recently, nanofabric.

What is it about carbon that's so special? Can these things be done with other elements, like nitrogen? Is it just because we have an oil (carbon) based economy, or what?

Seems like all the interesting stuff in materials physics in early 2000's is ALL CARBON!

Re:What is it about carbon?

[MAdMaxOr]

From Wikipedia: "[Carbon] also has the interesting chemical property of being able to bond with itself and a wide variety of other elements, forming nearly 10 million known compounds."

Not only is it able to chain, and thereby make organic compounds, DNA, nanofiber, but the bonds it forms can be very weak or strong. So yeah, carbon has unique chemical properties, its cheap, and (too) widely available.

As a side question, who thinks that as all of the advanced carbon materials become readily available over the next 50 years, and demand increases, that we may have found our solution to global warming? We'll scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to build our carbon products!