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.'"

Comments

Wait a minute

[BenjiTheGreat98]

Stronger than adamantium?!?!?

Re:Wait a minute

[the eric conspiracy]

Actually the word diamond is derived from the Greek word adamas, so in fact diamond is adamantium.

Re:Wait a minute

[dsanfte]

adamas, adamantis  N  M     3 6  M   [XTXCO]
steel, hardest iron (early); anything hard, adamant; white sapphire; diamond;

Re:Wait a minute

[mollymoo]

TFA says it's stiffer than diamond, that doesn't mean that it's harder than diamond.

Re:Wait a minute

[iq in binary]

Just because it's stiffer doesn't mean that it's harder. (god there are so many things wrong with that statement on so many levels)

Note however that we don't need a stonger abrasive material. Grinding works on the basis of extreme velocity on the part of the particles in the abrasive wheel or band to do the cutting work. Aluminum oxide would work for the purposes of grinding this material into print. Given that it's a ceramic within a tin matrix; ALO2 would do beautifully.

As for heavy cutting work, Tungsten Carbide would do just as well. I don't see anything to indicate that the material is HARDER than carbide.

And speak of the applications..........to tell you the truth there really aren't that many widespread uses for a material like this. For now, with the expense of this material that's going to stay as it is for quite a while, there are FEW cases that would warrant using this material.

Re:Wait a minute

[peragrin]

the driver would die.

Your car isn't made of steel any more but foldable, collapsable sections so the car takes damage instead of the people inside. Literally the materials are designed to bend at certain deceleration speeds. This goes back to the passenger compartment, where those sections suddenly become stronger. Ever notice how in a car wreck the only thing in one piece is the passenger compartment? The entire engine will go missing first.

Re:Wait a minute

[v1]

Another good thing to look up is "crumple zones", the areas of a vehicle designed to collapse while absorbing energy. In most cars, a head-on collision is supposed to force the engine and transmission down and out the bottom (since they are too solid to crumple) and the rest of the engine compartment collapses in on itself and hopefully slows down the vehicle or the intruding object to a safer speed before the crumple zone has been totally crushed and the remaining force starts in on the passenger area.

The trunk has less to worry about, there is no massive steel (engine or transmission) to get rid of so it is just designed to crumple and absorb energy of impact.

What amazes me is how well cars survive getting T-boned. In many cases the front end of the offending car is usually totally demolished and yet the struck driver's door is only pushed in a few inches.

The tradeoff of all this is the vehicle's odds of surviving. If you are in a 52 packard you can run into a wall at 20mph and not do a whole lot besides ruin the bumper. They'll be pulling your head out of the windshield however. Try that with a Taurus and all you'll notice is the airbag, until you go looking for the front of your car and find it in the trunk. Cars used to be designed to survive accidents. Now they are designed to protect their passengers instead. People cry about how expensive it will be to fix a modern car after running into a tree, but they shut up real fast when you point out they would be in a body cast right now if it weren't for all that damage to their car.

That's impossible!

[Bobdoer]

Diamond is the hardest metal known the man!

Re:That's impossible!

[CastrTroy]

Actually, according to wikipedia it isn't. It's the hardest natural material (which I think is what you meant, not metal). There are actually 2 known matericals that are stronger, and probably a third material after the one in this article is added to the article.

Re:That's impossible!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh?

Re:That's impossible!

[karnal]

No, because it's incredibly fucking nerdy. And annoying.

News for ______. Fill in the blank, and welcome.

Re:That's impossible!

[Falladir]

Don't conflate hardness with strength or stiffness. Hardness is not well quantified. For hardness we refer to the Mohs scale, which will tell you which of two substances is the harder, but doesn't strictly quantify hardness. A claim that substance A is "twice" as hard as substance B probably refers to the Young's Modulus, or stiffness, rather than to hardness.

A common way to measure the Young's modulus is to support a sample of the material on two struts, and then apply pressure from above to the center of the sample. The less it bends, the higher the Young's modulus. The apparatus looks like this.

Strength is a different quantity. Strength is the amount of force needed, per unit cross-sectional area, to cause the material to fail. For tensile strength, this means pulling apart. For compressive strength, it means collapsing. A material with great tensile strength can have a great weight hung from it without snapping, and a material with great compressive strength can act as a pillar to support a great deal of weight.

The article claims nothing about the strength of this material.

Re:That's impossible!

[mrgavins]

Stop being a nerdy geek, would you?

Space flight

[Ekhymosis]

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?

Re:Space flight

[Myrcutio]

one application i can think of for space travel is to use it in the hull of a ship to deflect particles traveling at high speeds. You could use an electrical current to heat this material to 58 degrees celsius in a short amount of time, all you would need is a method of detection that could locate the particles a few seconds before impact, and you've got a barrier 10x harder than diamond in between you and vacuum. As far as costs go, i think NASA can afford it, isn't all the wiring on the shuttle solid gold?

Ah misleading Slashdot article titles...

[tylersoze]

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.

Bah

[MadUndergrad]

Toughness != Stiffness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toughness : Toughness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffness : Stiffness

Re:Bah

[Andy Dodd]

And also, hardness != either of the above, and *hardness* is the material property diamonds are known for (in addition to having a reasonably high index of refraction, although not the highest by any means.)

The most typical test of hardness is attempting to scratch a material. (To measure a material's hardness on the Mohs scale, essentially a series of scratch tests are performed, and a material's place on the Mohs scale was determined by what it could scratch vs. what would scratch it.)

I don't know about stiffness, but diamonds are definately not *tough*. As your links above show, "toughness" is resistance to fracturing under stress, and one of the ways diamonds are cut and shaped is by fracturing them along their crystal lattice planes. There are plenty of materials (Including, I believe, many plastics) that are *tougher* than diamond, but not necessarily harder. (For example, I believe ABS plastic and polycarbonate plastic are extremely tough, but neither are hard - i.e. they are VERY difficult to break via stress and impact, but scratch easily.)

Stiffer than diamond?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to get that spam...

Hardness != toughness, get it right

[Dr. Zowie]

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.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Try again. Chuck Norris is the toughest material on earth, and he just snapped it in two using a karate chop.

Re:Nope

[TempeTerra]

True, but Chuck Norris was forged in an immense burst of energy at the very creation of the universe. This material can be produced in a lab, unlike Chuck Norris.

Re:Better than...

[macadamia_harold]

What are they going name this new SuperMaterial?

Unobtainium?

resistant to bending ....

[Ace905]

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.

---
hate me? nahhh

Re:resistant to bending ....

[Falladir]

will you be able to CUT THE DIAMOND with this material

No, you will not. The material is only stiffer than diamond in a narrow temperature range. If you tried to cut with it, it would heat up and lose this stiffness.

The article does a lousy job of explaining this temperature-dependent stiffness to non-experts. From what I understand, this is how it works: one of the two components is like a framework of tinkertoys, and the other is like a bunch of water balloons filling up the gaps in the tinkertoy structure. Both the tinkertoys and the water expand as the material's temperature is increased, possibly at varying rates. In that small range at 58 degrees F, the water baloons fit very tightly in the structure. They strain the tinkertoys, but don't break them. The tinkertoys flex as they usually would because the water balloons are holding them in place, so the entire assembly is very stiff.

Re:resistant to bending ....

[jd]

Diamond (hardness of 10) is the hardest naturally-occuring mineral, but it is not the hardest material. Ultrahard fullerite is close to twice as hard as diamond. Boron-carbide, tungsten-carbide and silicon-carbide (hardness of 9 each) are only marginally softer. Osmium (as well as being the most expensive metal and the densest metal) is as close to diamond as pure metals get (hardness 7), but doesn't quite cut it. (Pun intended.)

The hardest known material, at present, would be aggregated diamond nanorods. (These are apparently produced by crushing buckyballs at extreme pressures. What "Get Fuzzy" makes of this is currently unknown.)

Re:Obligatory...

[c6gunner]

What's that thing, like 2 karats? Doesn't look like you could do much with it....

Re:Got to wonder about other properties?

[bmo]

Obligatory movie quote:

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... ...fuck-all.

from "Snatch"

--
BMO

Not really. Here's how it works (sort of)

[Richard Kirk]

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.

And even that...

[IdahoEv]

... 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)

Crumple Zones

[dexter riley]

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.