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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.
Yes, but if you throw like a girl your neighbors will see.
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
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
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.
First of all its a general class of materials, its a gel (think jello) with the bulk substrate removed (think dehydrated jello). So its like talking about making stuff out of "metal" as opposed to "SAE 316L certified steel".
The second thing is its been around in some form or another for about 80 years now, not 20.
The third thing is all the manufacturing processes (as far as I know) involve replacing the substrate with supercritical solvent and venting out the solvent. Which, given typical supercritical vapor pressures, usually means the manufacturing plant occasionally blows up. An easy thing to remember is supercritical CO2 needs equipment built to a hundred bar. The actual number is closer to 70, but whatever, "a hundred" is easier to remember...
Standard slashdot car analogy, your car tires run about 2 bar, and mechanics at tire shops regularly get killed when they're inflated and they blow apart, tire cages or not. So to make an aerogel the size of a car tire, you need to inflate / deflate a tank running about 50 or so times the pressure. Your average greasemonkey would probably not retire with a pension from an aerogel factory.
I believe the sweeds blew a factory completely up in the 80s. Pressure vessel failures are such a PITA.
Also the process is inherently batch. Every modern industry relies on constant process, from steel to ipod assembly lines. Not gonna have widespread aerogel until someone figures out a continuous flow process.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This would be useful for visually seeing how much air is left.