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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."
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.
Buzzkill.
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?
I had a guy here who could explain just how this stuff worked, but he just couldn't handle using the mouse, and his accent was just too bad for my voice recognization software to handle.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
"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.
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.