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DoE Develops Flexible Glass Stronger Than Steel
An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Energy Office of Science recently collaborated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology to develop a resilient yet malleable new type of glass that is stronger than steel. The material can also be molded, and it bends when subjected to stress instead of shattering. The glass is actually a microalloy and features metallic elements such as palladium. This metal has a high 'bulk-to-shear' stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials. The team that developed the material believes that by changing various ratios, they could make it even stronger."
Would everyone just stop for a moment. If something is a glass (is in a glassy, amorphous state) it only means that it lacks long range crystallographic order. IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE TRANSPARENT TO BE A GLASS!! For example glassy metals.
Transparent aluminum is called sapphire, its existed for millenia.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Remember? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060126190325.htm
This news today is the next step in bringing these realities to market. Bravo to them all.
In the scheme of things with modern alloys, etc, is "Stronger Than Steel" that much of a claim these days? Sure for "glass" its impressive, but overall, is the phrase overused?
As a metalworker, I can assure you it is a meaningless marketing phrase due to the extreme range of commercially available steel.
Looking just at yield strength, cheapest crappiest low carbon hotroll from China (with embedded spark plugs and chunks of furnace slag included at no extra charge) maybe 20 or so kpsi on a really good day. Lets just say for man-rating purposes you design with Chinese steel around 5 kpsi, and even then you have nervous sleeping. Relatively exotic Northern European specialty steel mill product maybe mid 200s kpsi. So way over one order of magnitude.
Complicating it more, do you mean strength like per unit mass, where exotic non-iron alloys have beaten steels for decades, or per unit volume, where very little even approaches steel?
Standard slashdot car analogy... Steel strength varies like engine size, you know, from 50 cc mopeds up to 12 liter sports car engines. Steel strength does not vary like commuter car MPG, all of which are about 30 MPG.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Diamond ranks high on hardness, not strength (diamond used to be high point of hardness scale, but I think they have since discovered harder substances) What we usually refer to as strength is tensile strength, the point at which it breaks when you try to stretch it. Spider webs have a very high tensile strength for their cross sectional area. You "walk though them all the time" because the strands have a very small cross sectional area -- you could also walk through strands of steel of the same diameter. So all they are saying is that a strand of this new "glass" will withstand greater force than a strand of steel of the same diameter.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Diamonds are harder than steel, not stronger. Spider silk is stronger than steel, but not nearly as hard. (And incredibly thin.) This implies that a cable made of spider silk should be able to withstand more strain than a steel cable of the same size. On the other hand, a bridge supported by spider silk trusses will be far less sturdy than one made from steel trusses.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
What does stronger than steel actually mean?
Depends on your industry, but often, tensile strength per unit area. In the us that would be thousands of pounds pulling apart a chunk of steel of one square inch cross section. This is kind of important in the wire rope and chain industries, on the other hand piston makers or knife makers might have an alternative opinion. Anyway tensile KPSI values 20 and under is junk tier like Walmart China products, 50 is the good stuff, and over 200 is strange Swedish alloys made by gnomes in a secretive process that costs about as much per pound as sterling silver and only .mil can afford it.
For marketing / PR purposes, yes it means nothing. Just like calling machined parts "billet" means absolutely nothing. A billet used to be a slight step up from an ingot that you'd smoosh in a forge press before machining. Now all it means is its overpriced and probably shiny.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I would bet no fish (yeah...mammal, I know) wants to see the inside of a Pird of Prey.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Sorry to ruin your trekky fantasies, but we already have transparent aluminum.
There is an article about it here, and many more if you search.
Admittedly, it was developed after the movie.
When most people say the word, "glass," they mean something that's usually clear, usually brittle, usually an electrical insulator, has poor thermal conductivity, and is mostly impervious to solvents. Stuff like what's used to make windowpanes and drinking glasses. The main material in these is silicon dioxide (SiO2), and the "glass" refers to the fact that it is not a crystal, but an unordered solid. SiO2 crystals are called quartz. Note that most glass, using the vernacular meaning, is not microcrystalline, but truly unordered. This is what gives SiO2 glass, using the scientific meaning, some of its interesting properties, like the lack of a fixed melting point. Wax can often (not always, but often) be thought of as a hydrocarbon glass. Many plastics are also glasssy because they are amorphous at the molecular level as well.
The glass referred to in the article is a metallic glass, and is not transparent. The reason glassy metals are interesting is because of their unusual mechanical properties. The reason they are difficult to make is that when metal cools, it really, really, really likes to form crystals. The only way to get metals to form unordered glassy substances is to cool them extraordinarily quickly, essentially freezing each atom in its location from the liquid modality. Recent research, such as used in the linked article, has developed alloys that don't require extraordinary cooling rates, but still result in an unordered solid.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The tank walls were not transparent aluminum. They were plexiglass or the like (the movie specified thickness and all). The transparent aluminum was delivered to the "past" via a formula on the computer. It would have taken them years to go from that to huge sheets of the stuff.
No, only ferric metals 'rust', but there the rust is oxidation along with an expansion caused by oxidation, resulting in exposing more material to oxidation. And that's why iron objects rust away. You could say that "only iron rusts but all metals oxidize", but you would still be wrong since, no, not all metals oxidize. Gold, platinum and palladium do not oxidize under normal conditions.
Further, metals like aluminum, titanium, and zinc, along with stainless steel (steel combined with chromium) do not oxidize very much at all or only oxidize in a very thin layer on the surface, protecting the metal below. So, for all practical purposes, they don't rust either.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Well sapphire (corundum) is a form of alumina. Perhaps the GP was making a kind of pun on the Latin declensions -um and -a, representing the singular and the plural, playing on the American spelling "aluminum" (which sounds like the singular form of alumina) as opposed to the Commonwealth "aluminium".
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Nothing has happened here yet, but from accident reports with that pressure level, I can say it is enough to bend steel tubes like a fireman's hose bends when no one is holding it (of course the tubes rip open more easily, but the mechanics is the same). And when the big pressure vessels explode, the radius of the debris is in the order of kilometers (think ballistic style) and the sound radius is in the order of dozens of kilometers.