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Transparent Aluminum a Reality
TuballoyThunder writes "Many of us remember the scene from Star Trek IV where Scotty barters the formula for transparent aluminum for a small run. It now appears that we can now add transparent aluminum to the science fact column."
The ability to wrap your mother's sandwiches in transparent aluminum and loose your apetite before you even unwrap it!
Very appropriate to announce this discovery at the same time James Doohan's remains are being sent into space. One wonders if there is a closet Trekker in the military press office. :-)
Cheers,
jIyajbe
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Now if we could only arm our military vehicles with convential armor let alone the nifty new stuff..
- Gronk!
How quaint.
No pics :(
when you read the article, you find out that the material is not aluminum metal. It is just a transparent corund-like substance. Al203 alone is pretty hard (and easy to make - including gem colored versions) and the mixed oxide-nitride is probably harder.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Perhaps with this technology we can have see-through cans and this will no longer be a problem :)
Sound just what Apple need to make some scratch resistant screens for the iPod Nano :)
seriously. give the nano a nice coat of this and i think apple's little scratching post will turn into something nice and...well...scratchless
I don't think that'll catch on.
Grr...
I can now order my Wonder Woman jet! Now's where's my Golden Lasso and Amazon Bangles? Soon I hope. Now, if only surgery took well, I'd be all set...
IIRC the windshield of a Humveee is about 72" x 23"... thats 1656 square inches. The article quotes $10 - $15 a sq. inch, so the windshield would be worth $16,560 to $24,840.... I guess they wont be protecting fleets of vehicles with them?
The Air Force Research Laboratory's materials and manufacturing directorate is testing aluminum oxynitride -- ALONtm
And look.. the trademark is built right in as well!
The military is planning to test this new material on its nuclear wessels.
What'll be really nice is when prices get down to be viable for use in consumer-grade products. Say goodbye to broken windows from baseballs, cracked screens on dropped iPods, chipped windshields from rocks, and all sorts of other fun uses.
It should open up some cool architectural possibilities as well.
Polishing (like case hardening) belongs to a normal metallic property called work hardening. You work a metal it will become harder (but normally also more brittle). In fact it is rarer to have a metal that won't work harden than not. Time to go back to metal shop!!
See also here for earlier developments in this area.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Hmmmm....Has anyone noticed a pair of humpback whales going missing recently?
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
What is with that, anyway?
Aluminium is the 'correct' and internationally recommended way of writing it, with aluminum being a local variant. Personally, even as a Brit I think the second sounds more correct, but there you go.
As ever, Wikipedia reveals all.
Cheers,
Ian
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Transparant aluminium bottom in an airplane (-; (Only usefull if the airplane travels without cargo)
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Sapphire which is basically a crystal of aluminium oxide has been synthetised almost 100 years ago and is commonly used nowadays. Some non-scratch watches use that instead of glass.
A transparent case made of aluminium...Mmmmm, aluminium..
47 Meelion Dollars!?! I'm the cat!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Is aluminium pronounced:
/. poll, but everything I submit gets rejected... I wish there were _at the very least_, proforma reasons as why things get rejected so you know where you went wrong...)
a) AL-LEW-MIN-NEE-UM
or
b) AL-LUMIN-UM
Personally, I go with 'a' coz I'm a Brit, is it just U.S. peeps who pronounce it 'b' ?
(I'd submit this as a
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
I'm 40% aluminium! Bender
... and then they built the supercollider.
Finally, scrach-resistance for my Ipod Nano!
It means it'll resists anything except a bunch of bored teenage
scratch-taggers armed with screwdrivers at 3am on a sunday morning.
This isn't that strange, and certainly here on SlashDot I'd expect the readership to be well aware how things can get harder if they are rubbed the right way.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
"...loose your apetite before you even unwrap it!"
:)
I guess if you loosed your appetite on an unwrapped sandwich, you'd end up eating the whole thing wrapper and all! An amusing picture, even if you meant to type "lose" and suggest the opposite.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Scotty doesn't trade the formula for transparent aluminium for a small run of the stuff. He trades for a quantity of perspex.
Dr. Nichols says it'll take him "years to even calculate the matrix". Besides that, the stuff they delivered and installed was clearly perspex - it would have been much thinner had it been transparent aluminium.
The uses go way beyond windshields. How about full-length transparent SWAT shields? If it'll take a
What about airplanes? Make much of the body out of this, making maintenance that much easier.
How will the rest of the world recognize us if our tinfoils hats are transparent?
Scotty's been messing with the timeline again! What next, Mr. Scott? Warp drive in the Victorian era?
I think he did a little too much LDS.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Expect to see this to enter the consumer market for things like - IPod nano screens, watch faces, scratch reistant coverings on eyeglasses,etc. The expensive weapons grade version is supposedly not much diferent from the much cheaper non-weapons grade version, so expect the $10-$/sq inch!!! price to vastly drop. I give it one year before we start to commonly see this in the high cost items at first (Rolex and Tag watches, etc)
..........FULL STOP.
Unfortunately, from the article it seems ALONtm is noted for it's high compressive strength, whereas to build the sides of a whale-sized bath you need high tensile strength. Unless of course it's a particularly aggressive whale and keeps shooting armour-piercing rounds at the side of the bath, but then the bigger question would be "how did it pull the trigger"?
Then there's Helum, that noble gas. And Kurchatovum, that incredibly unstable element. And Lithum, of which batteries are made. Not forgetting Valum, for people too depressed to worry about spelling.
Yes, yes, I know, a whole continent of people can't spell that metal's name. It's just like the English who wrote "cocoa" when they should have written "cacao". Amazing how an illiterate in the wrong place at the wrong time can screw up a dictionary.
K.
Sounds like a hell of a nice screen protector for the nano
Thinnish coating of aluminum oxide on glass/plastic multilayer laminate improves its strength and scratch resistance.
News for non chemical nerds, maybe. A bit ho hum for anybody familiar with the AMAZING see through properties of things like aluminumium oxide, aka rubies and saphires.
For example, a glass bottle can be broken by putting a little sand into it and shaking vigorously. It's mainly the scraping action, not the weight of the sand, that causes the glass to break.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It is not unusual for metals to be increased in strength after polishing or grinding, as a method of stress relief. Ceramics, while beyond my experience, are likely similiar.
You're at the 58th floor of a building.
There is a fire. You can't use the stairs or elevators.
A)You break the glass, jump out and fall to your death.
B)You don't break the glass and suffocated because of the smoke.
Either way, you're toast.
Wrong...
A) You're jam
B) You're toast
The difference isn't subtle.
bugger it, i was going to mod in this discussion, but i have to respond...
3 - How impressive would it really be to crush a see-through ARMOUR PLATED, BULLET PROOF can on your forehead?
...pretty impressive i would have to say.
Google finds some pics as expected (Sorry, PDF) :
http://www.surmet.com/docs/Processing_ALON.pdf
I'm not 100% certain if they're genuine or mock ups though...
~Pev
It comes down to the fact that materials break due to initial cracks that grow bigger under stress.
Back in the late 70s early 80s I used to polish my bike components, particuarly brake calipers, for that very reason. It was in that era that there was a massive increase in technical and manufacturing sophistication from the Japanese makers, as a result of which anybody can now get well finished, non-pot-metal bike parts without having to spend a fortune for Campagnolo.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wonder thet the corrosion resistance is of this stuff. Most aluminum materials don't do well in the weather and I imagine even minor pitting would impact transparency.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"In a June 2004demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a .30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle [...]"
Never trust a journalist to get gun facts straight.
The M44 is a carbine version of the Mosin-Nagant, very short, easy to carry, but with nothing better than iron sights. It is about as far from a "sniper rifle" as anything you can see.
It has the coolest integral bayonet, though.
On the upside, the M-44 uses the same cartridge as the current Romanian "sniper" rifle, the PSL. The M44 has a short barrel so a steel-cored 7.62x54R projectile won't reach the same sort of velocities as it would out of a PSL rifle but it should be a pretty effective test against the sort of "armor piercing" light arms that any terrorist not carrying an RPG would be likely to have handy.
Scotty: Computer. Computer?
[Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it]
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.
I see a multitude of uses for transparent aluminum including semi-transparent road signs, reinforced windows and cool computer cases. Scotty lives!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
This stuff is transparent Aluminium, in the same way that "normal" glass is
transparent Silicon. Indeed, using this criteria, we already had transparent
Aluminium in the form of Saphire. Saphire is also rather hard and makes a good
optical material. While the invention of a suitably hard and tough transparent
material is obviously news-worthy it would be wise to steer clear of the same
mistakes that sci-fi writers make when they don't understand the "sci" bit.
However, going back to the Star Trek film in question, I always liked the way
that Scotty was able to create a new material and presumably the method for making
it on a tiny Apple Mac Plus! Was he using MacDraw I wonder?
return 0; }
Scotty didn't exchange the formula for a small run of transparent aluminum, it would have taken years for the plant to study the formula and tool up their factory to produce the stuff. He traded the formula for a large, thick sheet of plexiglass or similar that the company would have had on hand or actually be able to manufacture at that time.
University - a box of academia nuts.
I wonder what the refractive index of this material is? For those of us who look through tank windshield all day (figuratively speaking), if this material can be reduced in price and has a refractive index significantly greater than 1.66, then it would make our lenses much thinner, as well as being much more scratch resistant than polycarbonate.
Given that sapphire has a refractive index over 1.75, this *could* be a great breakthrough - if Big Green starts to consume large quantities of this, then the amortized NRE will be greatly reduced.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Not to be outdone by the Air Force, Steve Jobs just announced that the forthcoming PowerBook G5 will feature a bulletproof transparent aluminum case. This follows Apple's longstanding tradition of using expensive metals for G4 laptop cases: first titanium, now airplane aluminum, soon transparent aluminum. Apple designer Jonathan Ives expressed some disappointment that they had not yet been able to create a commercially viable uranium shell, but was optimistic that the transparent aluminum would still be sexy.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Scotty didn't exchange the formula for a small run of transparent aluminum. The exchange was the formula for a run of plexiglass panels. You are hereby ordered to watch Star Trek IV three times before Sunday.
Polishing (like case hardening) belongs to a normal metallic property called work hardening. You work a metal it will become harder (but normally also more brittle). In fact it is rarer to have a metal that won't work harden than not. Time to go back to metal shop!!
Go back? Ok, I'm in one every day.
While you're right about metals work hardening, you're wrong about how often it happens. Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane. Even soft magnetics like Cast Iron don't work harden until extremely high temperatures are reached. Something to the tune of 650-1100F, depending on the hardness rating you wish to achieve. If you're reaching temperatures that high before the part is finished, well, you're either cutting it off at the foundry or you're about to be fired. The methods used to actually harden materials in a noticeable fashion are specifically designed to superheat the part. Magnetics such as steel and any iron based material will be heated until red, blue or white hot to achieve hardening. This process is called annealing. Other metals are generally coated with a harder metal, not more than a thousand of an inch or two in thickness; this generally achieves the same affect.
Polishing however, is not generally meant to harden, and rarely does. When a part or surface is polished, part of that surface is actually worn away while polish is deposited. This is the only way to achieve mirror finish, if the part has been turned or faced the surface will have markings on it from the tools used to cut it. Polishing is the process of actually wearing away material to relieve the markings, and depositing polish to increase shine. People should note that the more reflective a metal surface is, the finer the finish. Mirror finish generally denotes a "256 dp finish", required often by aerospace or military applications. The dumbass of a parent knows nothing of what he's talking about, and needs himself to open up a machinist's handbook.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
I know somebody who has a hard time pronouncing the North American version of this (being from NA). It's always comes out 'A.lu.ni.um' on them. It's a real speech impediment which they don't like showcasing. So I encourage them to say it the British way because it's like saying an entirely different word which gets around the bad wiring that has burned A.lu.ni.um into their head.
So I don't see a great need to pick one pronunciation. It's not like we need to communicate to get along and not start wars or anything. Sometimes I'll watch Coronation Street just to laugh at the incomprehensible characters. Namely that chubby lady who sold the kid's dog to buy boots. Har! great stuff!
In the case of transparent alumin[...] I remember Scotty saying it the North American way despite being a Scotsman. So there's your proof right there. In the future the NA version wins out as the new standard. If you think I'm being silly to base knowledge of the future on STAR TREK just where do you think the formula for this stuff came from?
Since you mentioned it, I went to the IUPAC website and searched for "Aluminum". You know what came up? Hundreds of IUPAC journals with the word spelled that way. Clearly they don't find it mangled or deviant enough to edit in their publications. Dude.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A link to a press report showing an image of ALONtm.
_ August%202003.pdf
http://www.surmet.com/docs/ALON%20Press%20Release
-Rob
He did. The big piece of plexi, and the use of the Plexicorp helicopter. Lots of people assumed it was transparent aluminum because they weren't listening to Dr. Nichols when he said, "It'd take years just to figure out the dynamics of these matrices..."
Ugh. I shouldn't have known that part verbatim.
I had a sucky sig.
http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html#Engl ish
Written English is essentially a variety of Old French invented by somebody who spoke only Saxon and read only Latin.
--Basilius
English is essentially an imprecise dialect of Java, without the object orientation.
--Julian Morrison
English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.
--Eugene Holman
English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
--Benct Philip Jonsson
English is essentially a bizarre dialect of Chinese, pronounced entirely in the first tone.
--John Cowan
English is essentially Low German plus even lower French minus any sense of culture.
--Danny Weir
English is essentially Anglo-Saxon with all the cool bits taken out.
--Thomas Leigh
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
1) http://www.xoxide.com/clearacatxca.html
2) Eyeglasses.
3) Pipes.
4) Soda cans. (Pepsi could have used this during their Crystal Pepsi phase.)
5) Windshields.
6) Engines.
7) Bicycles. (Used with carbon-fiber, Lance Armstrong would be deliriously happy.)
8) Hurricane windows.
9) Decorative and durable lawn furniture.
10) Utensils.
I have a feeling someone might find a way to swirl dyed mixtures into the clear part to make some sort of swirlie colored "glass" for vases that won't break. Eh... I'm bored...
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Actually, no. Current ceramic rifle plate technology for human-worn body armor does not shatter when hit with a single round. See here.
It's amazing to me how many in the Slashdot crowd will jump up and down screaming about standards compliance until it comes to written English, whereupon the rules (i.e. - standards) are apparently taken as meaningless.
A transparent ceramic that's lighter and stronger than glass and the various plastics now used, and you think it doesn't have a practical application? It doesn't even take much of an imagination to find tons. Armor, obviously. Better windows on aircraft and spacecraft (where weight matters much more than on a ground vehicle). Child-proof computer monitors (OK, that one's a stretch...)
"In 1808, Humphry Davy originally proposed the name alumium while trying to isolate the new metal electrolytically from the mineral alumina. In 1812 he changed the name to aluminum to match its Latin root. The same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, objected to aluminum, and proposed the name aluminium."
So aluminum was the first spelling, which was later change by language nazis because it didn't sound right.
Don't blame us Americans for trying to be historically accurate.
English doesn't just borrow words from other languages. It sometimes stalks other languages, drags them into a back alley, beats them senseless, and rifles through their pockets for new words. Sometimes, the words get a bit spindled in the process, but English doesn't care, it just likes new words.
They have a pic on their photo page at http://www.af.mil/photos/index.asp:
.30 caliber armor-piercing bullet fired from 25 yards away using a Russian M-44 sniper rifle. Shown is the test piece, which demonstrates the armor's ability to stop penetration from armor-piercing threats. (U.S. Air Force photo)
Low-res and high-res.
Cutline:
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- This ground-finish transparent armor test piece withstood the impact of a
While you're right about metals work hardening, you're wrong about how often it happens. Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane.
Or you're working a part by hand. Or the part does duty in a high vibration environment (copper fuel line are verboten on small airplanes for just this reason). Or you bend a heat treated nose gear on a hard landing and then try to bend it back into place.
It doesn't happen often in a machine shop, unless the machinist is explicity trying to do it, but metalsmiths all over the world take advantage/try to avoid work hardening in various situations.
BTW, a technical definition used in a machine shop may not be the common usage in the rest of the world. To the general world that I've been exposed to, work hardening is any increase in the hardness/brittleness derived from the stretching and shrinking involved in getting the metal to the desired shape. In this aspect, the gp is not necessarily off base. A stainless steel slapper is often used to 'polish' aluminum fairings, and the aluminum is harder after the process.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Transparent Aliminum has been around for all our lifetimes: Sapphire = Aluminum Oxide. My watch has a sapphire crystal... Yours might too.
Well, according to the article, the aluminum took armor piercing rounds from a 50 cal Browning Sniper rifle without breaking like the glass armor did. Also it weighs less, it doesn't scratch as much, (providing better visibility), it has a longer lifetime so it doesn't have to be replaced as often and therfore may be cheaper in the long run. Read the article next time - it answers a lot of your questions.
Expect to see this to enter the consumer market for things like - IPod nano screens, watch faces, scratch reistant coverings on eyeglasses,etc.
If I read TFA correctly, I would expect to see many more applications than this. One application I would expect to see, as soon as the price drops, is automotive glass. Traditional 'bulletproof' glass has little value in a consumer vehicle, but this material is allegedly lighter, stronger and more scratch resistant (and I would assume chip resistant) than glass. Glass makes up a significant portion of the weight in an automobile. A lighter alternative would decrease the weight and potentially increase fuel efficiency. On top of that durability and safety factors would probably also help adoption of this technology into the automotive industry. The only problem I see is that traditional glass manufacturers will cry foul.
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Hey all,
I heard a while back that a thin film of selenium, when exposed to hydrogen gas, would become transparent.
Would it be possible to make a transparent photovoltaic cell? You know, like a window that could filter out ultraviolet light and turn it into electricity, yet transmit visible light?
For that matter, would it be possible to add optical brighteners to greenhouse glass to increase the quantity of light that plants can use while reducing the risk of heat damage from noonday sun?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Why did Scotty even need transparent aluminum? Plate steel makes a fine whale aquarium.
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
...transparent aluminium actually exists? I won't believe it till I see it!
Okay. Step back a second. At the point where you entered the thread, I wasn't denying the existence of applications. I was claiming that the article, which I "didn't read", does not provide enough information to know that the research is cost-justified. This is because there are a number of considerations in determining whether the research was a good use of scarce resources. The article did not answer any of those questions. To determine that the research was cost justified, you have to check off a number of things:
-Are users willing to pay the amortized cost of the research in its applications? Crude example: if the research has an amortized cost of $10 on each unit, but users are willing to pay only $1 for the feature, the research already didn't pay for itself. This may sound obvious, but keep in mind, inventions can do many "cool" things and still fail this test! Similar example: let's say (for simplicity) that the invention can just be used by the Air Force. Let's say that currently, the Air Force can double its combat effectiveness with $1e9. Then say the invention allows the Air Force to double its combat effectiveness for $2e9. In that case, the research was a waste. If instead, the research can double the combat effectiveness for $5e8, that is a gain of $5e8, which can then apply against the cost of the research to see if it paid for itself.
-Summing up all those cost savings must then be greater than the research costs, discounting for forgone opportunities, aka interest. If the research cost $1e9 and saves $1e9 20 years later, that's a loss, because you could have just put the $1e9 in a bank and let the interest accrue.
-That's not all. You have to then divide by the success rate of the research. The research gains must pay for all research costs; you can't just just count the winners and ignore the losers. The winners must also recoup the cost of the losers.
If it meets all those tests, then the research was justified. AGAIN, I don't deny that there are many uses of the research, but the article I "didn't read" gives no information about whether it met any part of the above. Contrary to what you claim, it would help if there were more people like me giving reality checks: "Can't we use a memory thermometer for the same purpose?" (referring to the memory metal discussed in an earlier article) Too often people count the benefits and ignore the costs. Even if the benefits do ultimately outweight the costs, you should still consider them. Getting it right through luck is a bad policy.
So, just to clarify, when you count ALL benefits, the research could be justified; the article just doesn't show that, and people rarely make this calculation.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531