Slashdot Mirror
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!?!
High costs in no way should discourage Apple customers by now.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It is NOT transparent.
Just asking.
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.
High cost encourages Apple customers.
Buzzkill.
That's too bad. I was really hoping to be able to get a see-thru scuba tank.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
That would be different.
Of course, what you really need is a double-walled one with fake fish in between the layers or something like a snowglobe. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
Brings up an interesting new concern for Airport Screening! Transparent and Stronger then Steel! Hmmmmm...
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.
This would be useful for visually seeing how much air is left.
Weight might not matter in space, but mass does.
which is totally what she said
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.
I've already read about transparent Aluminum glass many years ago. Problem is it requires being taken from molten hot to frozen before certain internal structures can form.
If enough money was put into it, we already have the tech to make a car's wind shield out of aluminum, but it would be crazy expensive right now.
But yes, the current talked about glass is opaque, but makes for great support.
"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...
Except that in HPA tanks (such as SCUBA), there is no liquid state of the gas in the tank so it wouldn't look any different at 3000 psi than at 500psi. Now for Carbon Dioxide this could be useful, if it were transparent that is.
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.
It is a metallic glass, not a silicon glass like drinking glasses.
Look for cookware that has a titanium ceramic coating. It's no stick and won't contaminate your food with metal flavor.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
he didn't invent the thing?
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