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Material Tougher Than Diamond Developed
sporkme has handed us a link to a New Scientist article. The piece outlines the development of a new substance reported to be stiffer than diamond. A team of scientists from Washington, Wisconsin, and Germany combined the ceramic barium titanate and white-hot molten tin with an ultrasonic probe. The new material was, in some tests, almost 10x more resistant to bending than diamond. Composite materials researcher Mark Spearing of Southampton University comments on the result: "The material's stiffness results from the properties of the barium titanate pieces, Spearing says. As the material cools, its crystal structure changes, causing its volume to expand. 'Because they are held inside the tin matrix, strain builds up inside the barium titanate,' Spearing explains, 'at a particular temperature that energy is released to oppose a bending force.'"
Stronger than adamantium?!?!?
:wq
"Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!" What are they going name this new SuperMaterial??
Sorry, I couldn't resist
No words of wisedom here.
Diamond is the hardest metal known the man!
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Will this material be light enough for future space exploration, such as space stations and colony materials? Or is the cost associated with making it too prohibitive? How about the melting temperature/pressure resistance for deep earth exploration?
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
I love them almost as much as dupes. :) Material Tougher Than Diamond Developed...(in some tests), like say: "The tests were carried out at a variety of temperatures. Between 58C and 59C the samples became stiffer than diamond."
Not to knock the experiment though, it seems interesting, and I'm sure there are all sorts of new exotic materials on the horizon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toughness : Toughness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffness : Stiffness
I can't wait to get that spam...
Toughness is a measure of the amount of energy necessary to break a material. Hardness is a measure of the amount of pressure required to deform it. The two are not the same. In fact, diamond is not a particularly tough material -- which is one reason why folks are discouraged from wearing diamond jewelry when, say, rock climbing. It's easy to fracture a diamond by bashing it against something even moderately hard -- even though no mineral is harder than the diamond, good ol' granite is much tougher.
I'm still waiting for a material stiffer than my middle-aged spine.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Try again. Chuck Norris is the toughest material on earth, and he just snapped it in two using a karate chop.
There's so many ways to measure the qualities of a material, I don't think anybody would be surprised to know steel is more than 7 times denser than water. But some people would be amazed to find Mercury is almost twice as dense as steel.
This, "resistant to bending" terminology seems like a real stretch of imagination to me. When do we, as average people ever consider the force involved in -bending- a diamond? It really doesn't sound like a practical thought experiment, and therefore doesn't sound even mildly interesting.
Spider's Silk is 'stronger' than steel - we've all heard. But there's about 1000 reasons you can't build a ship, or a building or even a walking-cane out of spider's silk.
This just sounds like bad hype to me ; what I want to know, and what I think everybody wants to know is - will you be able to CUT THE DIAMOND with this material. Diamonds have been the upper-limit of our prowess with cutting-wheels ; do you have a better material for grinding and cutting? Don't confuse the issue.
Unfortunately I couldn't read the article (slashdotted? what the hell) so I'm going based on the write-up available. don't hate me if the article answers my question.
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hate me? nahhh
Ace
These go up to 11. [/spinal tap]
What is mankind really? Well, it's just two words put together Mank, and ind.
What's that thing, like 2 karats? Doesn't look like you could do much with it....
Obligatory movie quote:
...fuck-all.
Sol: No, it's a moissanite.
Lincoln: A what?
Sol: A moissanite is an artificial diamond, Lincoln.
Sol: It's Mickey Mouse.
Spurious.
Not genuine.
And it's worth...
from "Snatch"
--
BMO
Looks pretty soft actually.
Software patents delenda est.
The Wikipedia article on aggregated diamond nanorods is a little more helpful. However, there is a non-carbon material harder than diamond (ultrahard fullerine). What we seem to be seeing is that exotic materials form at the real extremes of pressure and/or temperature - that remain stable at normal atmospheric pressures and temperatures. We also know that crystals form very differently under extreme changes in pressure and/or temperature. This discovery isn't particularly earth-shattering in and of itself. What is interesting is that material science is continuing to evolve in the most unexpected of directions, with those involved being rather more creative in their research than has been typical in other disciplines.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Barium titanate is a structure called a spinel. It has oxygen ions packed in a face-centred cubic structure, with the barium and Titanium ions stuck on the holes between. Above a certain temperature, spinels are cubic. however, at lower temperatures, the structure can reduce its energy by breaking symmetry and squashing a bit down one of the cubic axes, becoming orthorhombic. This compression is not huge, but it is a lot bigger than the typical stretchings you get due to thermal expansion or mechanical stress.
Stick the spinel structure into a tin matrix and cool it. If you are ingenious about your choice of tin matrix, then the stress on the tin can actually get the spinel to change its shape in a way that opposes the bending, rather than going with it as you might expect. Tin is funny stuff - it also has a change in crystal structure on cooling from cubic to hexagonal (though at a much lower temperature) so I guess it is somehow squeezing the spinel in some anisotropic fashion and triggering the phase change.
This is ingenious stuff but it isn't really a high stiffness in the normal sense, any more then the compound pendulums you can somtimes find in grandfather clocks have a very low thermal expansion coefficient. Those have brass and steel rods which all have expansion coefficients, but they are put together in a way that makes the stotal expansion zero. Supposing you had a piezo crystal, with attached electronics that applied a voltage causing it to resist any force put upon it. You could make this infinitely stiff depending on your level of control, or even have it push pack on what is pressing on it.
So, back to your original question. It is heavy, and it only demonstrates the stiffness over a limited range. Bulk material stiffness is not usually important - you can make stiff structures like a cage of tubes by design. However, if you wanted to make some structure appear perfectly stiff, then some active control like the hypothetical piezo stuff I described earlier would probably be lighter and better. I would love to know what this ingenious stuff is for, but I don't think it is for space.
True... and "toughness" is not the same as "stiffness" either. "Toughness" refers to a material's resistance to failure by fatigue (whereas "stiffness" is, as you said, resistance to bending -- Young's Modulus). They are clearly not the same thing, as there are plenty of brittle materials which are stiff yet fail quickly in fatigue.
On a related subject, do you ever wince when somebody on TV refers to something that can push harder as being more "powerful?" Or who talks about some kind of battery having more "power" than another when they clearly mean "energy?" I understand that these words are commonly confused in everyday use, but -- if you're putting together a supposedly-educational show, for the love-of-god get it right; even if your viewers don't appreciate the subtlely, choosing words like "velocity" or "energy" when appropriate aren't going to confuse them!
To science writers everywhere: I know, I'm not perfect either -- but could you please refrain from running your fingernails across my mental chalkboard?
I needed an Allen Key in a small size that I didn't have.
I took a nail and filed one end to make a hexagon of the correct size.
I bent it to the traditional L shape. Nails are "tough as nails" so it bent without breaking.
I attempted to undo the socket cap screw. The edges of my hexagon got squished. Nails are "hard as nails"? Wood thinks so, but socket cap screws are unimpressed.
Plan B: file a hexagon on the end of a piece of "silver" steel. Heat to cherry red on gas stove. Quench. Bake at gas mark 9 for twenty minutes to anneal. Use on socket cap screw. Success!
If "hard" is what you need, "hard" is what you have to get, "tough" will not unscrew it.
... doesn't mean it's tougher than diamond. Any mechanical engineer will remind you that strength, stiffness, and toughness are three different properties. IIRC my materials engineering class 15 years ago, they are approximately:
strength: maximum load before failure
stiffness: resistance to deformation
toughness: tendency to avoid reduction in strength over time in the face of repeated deformation
also:
hardness: ability to resist permanent deformation, particularly vs. small surface insults like scratches and indentations.
Diamond is very strong, very stiff, and very hard but it is definitely not tough: large blocks of the stuff are fairly brittle and tend to crack and chip. In fact extremely stiff materials are often not tough because they are brittle. OP has a very screwed-up title.
From TFA, we have no idea whether or not this new material is either strong or tough or hard: only that it is extremely stiff. (cue tasteless jokes)
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
My old Geo Metro had three crumple zones! Between the front and rear bumpers, between the left and right doors, and between the roof and tires.