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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."
Awesome!
Proverbs 21:19
Transparent Aluminum!?!
That's nothing. It's transparent aluminum we're all waiting for.
for the iPhone 5, and then I saw how much it costs. (Palladium turns out to be rather expensive)
for the very rich, if it takes much Pa
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
If it didn't, that would be great encouragement to find a faster, cheaper manufacturing method.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
It is NOT transparent.
Archologies or "mini-archologies", anyone?
Emotions! In your brain!
I hope you like our little aquarium.
Glasssteel spell, see PHB.
Just asking.
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.
...for the cameras. The whales wouldn't care. They spend lots of time in the dark. And besides, which would make you feel better? magically appearing in a black void? Or looking out and seeing the insides of a Bird of Prey?
What does stronger than steel actually mean? A spider web is stronger than steel, but I walk through them all the time. A diamond is stronger than steel, but I can hit it with a hammer and it smashes. Stronger than steel sounds good, but just like foods that say they are all natural, doesn't mean anything.
Might be good for windshields for cars in case of crashes, where they would not break....or could they still break if the impact was big enough???
It's been compared to steel....
So is this more a case of Star Trek winning (transparent aluminum) or Star Wars winning (transparisteel)?
They both lose.
The initial samples of the new metallic glass were microalloys of palladium with phosphorous, silicon and germanium that yielded glass rods approximately one millimeter in diameter. Adding silver to the mix enabled the Cal Tech researchers to expand the thickness of the glass rods to six millimeters.
No steel/iron or aluminum at all in the mixture, at least according to the article.. :-)
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I'm curious, does anyone have links to any resources which might explain the Department of Energy's involvement? Not that DoE can't be involved in basic materials research, but I suppose that they must have some sort of energy-related application in mind for such a material. I'm curious how this might advance energy?
I can imagine a LOT of potential uses for it, but a lot of those uses also would rely on other properties (not just strength), from structural, to piping, to casting boilers/reactors/turbines out of the material, to creating energy storage flywheels, storage containers for used nuclear fuel, etc, which all seem like a stronger material might be useful, but I honestly don't know enough to evaluate whether those would actually be potential uses for such a material? Is there some *particular* need for which steel is currently used, but steel is considered not as good a material as they actually need?
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
Twenty years ago, we though NASA's aerogel was going to be everywhere today. It promised the light-transmission and strength of regular glass, while being literally light as a feather and the best thermal insulator known to man. It seemed like eventually you could build entire houses out of this stuff.
Today, aerogel is nowhere to be found as a structural material, probably because it's so expensive. They do put pulverized aerogel into shoe insoles as insulation for mountain climbing, and you can buy a gumball-sized chunk of aerogel on eBay for USD$20 or so. I still wonder why nobody ever managed to get the cost down.
Heck yeah, I see someone went back in time to give us the formula for transparent aluminum! :)
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
... CAN throw rocks?
Unfortunately its ingredients also make it an almost unaffordable unobtainium for now, with the first applications expected small enough to crown ... neither your house nor your next iPhone, but (according to Technology Review) probably your teeth for a lifetime.
I thought the Slashdot Consensus(tm) was that the government never invents anything ever as an absolute rule with no deviation.
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.
Aerogel is so light and fluffy, you can easily crush it between two fingers. That's my understanding, anyway (I haven't actually touched the stuff).
-kgj
I was wondering about this myself. I'm guessing that since they don't qualify their statement, their glass alloy must be strong under tensile, compressive, and shearing stresses at all temperatures and pressures when compared with any commercially available steel or steel alloy.
Impressive stuff.
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.
Brings up an interesting new concern for Airport Screening! Transparent and Stronger then Steel! Hmmmmm...
I suppose this explains why the price of palladium has nearly doubled over the past six months. I wonder if this was public knowledge and Slashdot was just behind the curve as usual or not.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The initial samples of the new metallic glass... yielded glass rods approximately one millimeter in diameter. Adding silver to the mix enabled the Cal Tech researchers to expand the thickness of the glass rods to six millimeters.
So it's not as though they're making windows panes out of this stuff, but it's interesting nonetheless. The way they create an amorphous structure is fascinating:
The size of the metallic glass is limited by the need to rapidly cool or “quench” the liquid metals for the final amorphous structure. The rule of thumb is that to make a metallic glass we need to have at least five elements so that when we quench the material, it doesn’t know what crystal structure to form and defaults to amorphous.
It sounds as though innovations in the quenching process might enable larger shapes, or perhaps even sheets, to be produced.
Dear sir, that's hardly an appropriate way to address your in-laws.
This would be great for skyscrapers.
Apartment buildings. Full of supermodels.
#DeleteChrome
Admittedly, it was developed after the movie.
And you believe that's a coincidence?!?
#DeleteChrome
Kitchenware. Yes please. A full set of pots, pans, plates, the works.
I do not like cooking in or with metal because it leaves a metallic taste in the foods
but using glassware, there is always the risk of breaking it and injuring someone.
And Corningware changed their glass type and they now are prone to EXPLODE at all the wrong times and places.
I would gladly pay for a kitchen full of this stuff, it would last forever and solve many problems at in one.
So hurry up and get that stuff to market!
I worked for a steel company for a little while. The reason why steel is great and will always be the greatest structural material is steel has by far the best Strength to $ ratio of any material that is good in both directions on all 9 of the tensor loading methods. Concrete is the best in pure compression. But if you have/could have compression & tension (3 axis), sheer (3 axis), and/or torsion (3 axis). And a variation in the loading at 0.01 to 100 Hz, steel will always offer the best strength to cost ratio. It's cheep, It's strong, It's tough. And for practical objects of practical sizes and costs and working conditions, it generally has the best strength to weight as well. Steel normally beats wood because stiffness is normally the design limit for most objects and hollowed tubes/beams of steel are lighter than solid wood for the same weight. Steel has been #1 and will stay #1 for all your lifetimes. Get used to it.
palladium? Part of the platinum group, and the reason catalytic converters cost so much money? The mining of palladium is so toxic that the primary site that it's mine at, Norilsk Russia is considered to be one of the most polluted places on earth.
http://www.aboutinteresting.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/norilsk-russia.jpg
Good one guys.
Not necessarily. Of course, it isn't made anywhere near the same way as the stuff in the movie (I don't seem to remember the molecule being shown on the computer containing a nitride) but maybe it was an inspiration to somebody. Who knows?
"Strong as" or "stronger than" steel is a popular and meaningless phrase. Various grades of steel are all over the place in terms of strength.
In terms of yield strength, annealed 1118 is 41 ksi. "High strength" steel used in submarine hulls is around 80 ksi. Annealed 4340 is 69 ksi; normalized, it's 125 ksi, while heat treated, it can be as high as 243 ksi or as low as 124 ksi, depending on the degree of treatment. You can see why 4130 and 4340 tubes have been used in aircraft structures as long ago as the 1920's or before, and are also good for automobile engine connecting rods. They are also cheap, readily available, and not only made by gnomes in Sweden. Ordinary steel piano wire has a tensile strength over 300 ksi.
Thus, a particular grade of, for example, high strength precipitation hardening aluminum alloy, say 7075-T6, with a yield strength of 73 ksi, is stronger than some steels and decidedly less strong than other steels.
Strength alone is never the only consideration in practical terms. Ductility and toughness are also important.
And we all know "Palladium Poisoning in Chest...Painful way to die..."
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
I don't watch many movies lately, haven't seen any Harry Potter, etc. and I haven't watch the latest TV shows. The Star Trek movies I have seen so I can understand the "Scotsman tested" tagline, but I wonder if I'm missing other nuances. Though I have to ask, are there any new movie or TV memorable moments? Or do they all suck these days (i.e. when Sci-Fi went SyFy)? Another famous quote which practicing engineers and scientists have to occasionally say to their PHB, "I can't violate the laws of physics!"
mfwright@batnet.com
This is a metallic glass, also known as an amorphous metal. Metals are not transparent.
Corning has had a similar material for decades, they just didn't know what to do with it .
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Hah!
You are forgetting that since it is transparent, you can see through the tank and count the gas molecules! The Gas Level Inspection area is shaped like a magnifying lens, don't forget.
Hey, this is fun...almost like Calvin Ball!
Both Calvin Ball and Pedantry have no bounds, and whomever makes up the best rules...WINS!!!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I was taught in a materials science-type class years ago that glass used for ordinary bottles and jars and such has always had superior tensile strength to that of steel. So yeah, that particular bit of marketing isn't really that impressive. I guess if they made it stronger in other ways as well, maybe it's something.
Still, the only reason this made Slashdot is because people like their Star Trek references.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
There has been a type of metallic glass in commercial transformer cores for over twenty years. This new alloy is a different story, but the main stumbling block for a lot of these metastable materials is that they are very hard to work into whatever final shape you want. Apply heat and you lose the properties. The transformer cores work because the metallic glass is fabricated as thin sheets. Piling the cut sheets up and clamping them together gets the job done. Other forming techniques like powdering the metallic glass then squashing it together with explosives so that the properties would be retained were investigated in the 1980s but did not seem to be commercially viable.
It's not a completely new idea. Metallic glass is even mentioned in a 1980s pop song from Iceland FFS. Also in terms of tensile strength ordinary window glass is stronger than steel which is why you can't scratch it with a steel knife. It's just very brittle so you can't put it under much tensile load without smoothing off the surface imperfections with something like hydrofluoric acid (this acid soaks through the skin and preferentially dissolves bone - nasty stuff). A perfectly smooth bit of window glass can support more weight than a very strong steel.
But not for manufacture
he didn't invent the thing?
This is nice, but...call me again when it's cheap enough to make buildings out of.
Transparent conducting oxides are not new. A form of tin oxide was used to coat windows on high altitude bombers in WWII. An electrical current was sent through the coating which acted as a defroster.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
This is slashdot, don't we hate palladium? http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/02/17/1740211.shtml?tid=109
Here's a helpful diagram
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
This concerns me in the way steel toed boots often concern soldiers. With the strength of steel, it must take a lot of pressure to make the glass bend. Therefore, what does one do when they are pinned down by this glass? It probably takes a strength greater than that of a human to bend, so it could doom someone just as well as it could protect them.
Let's see : Palladium, phosphorus, germanium, silicon and silver? If they need to have all these in the pure state this will be
quite costly.
Ingredient Dollars / oz
Palladium - 800
Germanium - 85
Silver - 25
Phosphorus - 700
Silicon 100
Pain is merely failure leaving the body