Nanotech Makes Steel 10x Stronger

An anonymous reader writes: A new metal-making process currently in testing at oil fields uses nano-scale plating to make metals like steel as much as ten times stronger than they would be without it. "[The process] uses an advanced form of electroplating, a process already used to make the chrome plating you might see on the engine and exhaust pipes of a motorcycle. Electroplating involves immersing a metal part in a chemical bath containing various metal ions, and then applying an electrical current to cause those ions to form a metal coating. The company uses a bath that contains more than one kind of metal ion and controls how ions are deposited by varying the electrical current. By changing the current at precise moments, it can create a layered structure, with each layer being several nanometers thick and of different composition. The final coating can be up to a centimeter thick and can greatly change the properties of the original material."

Comments

Star Trek did it!

[ArcadeMan]

Lt. Barclay: Commander, this is what we're thinking of using to replace the damaged warp plasma conduit.
Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge: [examines the unit] Yeah, Reg... yeah, that's good. But you're going to need to reinforce this copper tubing with a nanopolymer.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocooki...

Re:Star Trek did it!

[ArcadeMan]

Yeah sure, whatever. Just re-modulate the shields frequency and we're good to go.

Ob SF.

[Anonymous Coward]

A. E. Van Vogt's classic SF novel "Slan" had a major plot point centering on "10 point steel". Perhaps we've finally implemented his vision...

Ten times stronger?

[Okian Warrior]

I've been rummaging around their website, and can only find references to corrosion resistance. That a specially-plated metal is more corrosion resistant I can easily believe.

But 10x stronger? That seems a bit... hard to believe.

Does plating a piece of steel really multiply the yield strength by 10x? Any materials scientists want to comment on this?

Also, how does a 1cm coating fare during changes in temperature? Will the coating peel off due to thermal expansion/contraction of the underlying metal?

I couldn't find any supporting scientific studies.

Is this for real?

Re:Ten times stronger?

[shione]

I was gonna post the same thing. The article is pretty devoid of details and mentions nothing about tensile and compressive strength.

All it pretty much says is improved corrosion resistance and this short paragraph:

"David Lashmore, a professor of materials science at the University of New Hampshire who has conducted work in the area, says nano-engineered layers can make a material stronger by stopping cracks from moving through it."

So it sounds like it 'holds' the metal together from micro fractures but it says nothing about taking on the applied forces which would make it actually stronger.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Bugler412]

not directly changing the strength perhaps, but what if extreme corrosion resistance allowed you to reduce margins on structural members of bridges for instance (appropriately tested and vetted of course please!) or changed the durability of steel rebar in concrete? Reduced assumptions of corrosion loss over the years, that can be very significant and give an effective real world increase in the strength you are able to assume.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[burtosis]

We already have steels approaching 10x stronger than mild steel, I'm not sure what they are even trying to say. The complete lack of any details, along with fantastic nebulous claims smacks of bs. Perhaps it's like another poster said, it improves tensile load bearing in corrosive enviornments which can seriously weaken parts and make them susceptible to fatigue.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Dutch Gun]

Nearly anything becomes economical if you can automate it and scale it up large enough. We'll have to see how the testing process goes first, I'd think. Civil engineering is a pretty conservative field, for very good reasons. At the scale we're making things nowadays, you need to be really, really certain about the properties of your building materials, and how it will hold up for the next fifty years under stress. I'd imagine they'll go through many years of testing and deploying in relatively small scales to prove it's worth, then start working their way up as everyone grows more confident of it's long-term viability.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Isn't the whole family of alloys we call 'steel' essentially a testament to the fact that certain nanoscale structures(that, conveniently for us, can be produced by comparatively primitive methods) in iron can radically improve its properties compared the the (actually pretty lousy) pure metal?

Re:Ten times stronger?

[blackest_k]

Actually it does make sense small cracks do concentrate stresses at the head of the V which break through the crystal structure a layer at a time.

As a simple demo get a piece of paper and pull on it, you will find it pretty hard to tear it , now just nick the edge of the paper and try again, you should find it yields quite easily.

The tensile strength of steel would be a lot higher if it wasn't full of imperfections. incidentally there are two crystal structures you get with steel face centered cubic and body centered cubic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

now the interesting thing about this is that when you cool down steel rapidly you get one form and slowly you get the other form so if your quenching something more than a foot thick you get both types of crystals since heat just isn't removed fast enough from the centre. the larger crystal structure is in the centre and the smaller crystal structure is on the outside. This means the inside is trying to be bigger than the outside. so the outer surfaces are massively stressed. like a bomb stressed seriously. You can't cut through steel stressed like this with a saw as the cutting would unbalance the stresses and it would blow apart, so you have to do something called plunge grinding which is done in a massive lathe with a grinding wheel taking it down equally on all sides.

This is what happens when you produce a roll for a cold rolling mill the outside is very hard with a softer core. Usually the forces are lower than the uts of the steel but sometimes it isn't and you get catastrophic failures. generally this happens in the quenching tank where its safe you normally hear a few bangs as lumps of steel spawl off from the outside followed by a boom as the roll breaks apart and goes crashing down to the bottom of the tank.

Rarely they fail after the heat treatment, joe the hardness tester where i used to work was nearly killed by one. he'd hardness tested it around 12pm (the hardness was abnormally high around 890 vickers) an hour later it blew apart a ton and a half of journal end was launched across the factory floor missing his legs by inches. he was off work for a week after with the shock. We also had a used roll blow up in a storage warehouse one weekend and it took a wall out, this had been in service and had been worn down to below a serviceable size. Even after all that time it was still stressed ...

back on topic , it seems reasonable that by removing the sites for cracks to occur the uts of the steel will be much higher, normally the way round the problem is to make the thing bigger that way the forces applied will not break the cross section of course that makes it heavier and harder to work with which is why its a specialized area like drilling where this has been applied, with the plating thicknesses used the cost will be way higher than for the regular steel pipes, i'd expect probably more than 10x the cost but the rig would be able to drill deeper and that's what matters, and the return on that makes the drilling costs look like peanuts.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[burtosis]

Absolutely not! Only fancy expensive materials have small scale structure. Why the very famous buysumberg principle alone states if you try to look and see without paying its indeterminate, simple introductory business laws at work.

seriously though, http://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki... if you had a 'perfect' crystal of metal, such as is common microscopically, the strength of pure metals is around 1000x that of actual samples due to defects. Basically defects pre-stretch the bonds removing most of the needed energy needed to make them slip. Controlling how the defects occur through easy to apply processes is exactly how its possible to easily change the properties.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[orgelspieler]

As a corrosion coatings engineer, I can tell you that this already happens. It's the whole reason I have a job. You see those green pipes going down the road on a flatbed truck? That's fusion bonded epoxy (powder coating) on plain jane steel pipes. There are several places that FBE coat their rebar before putting it in concrete structures, like you suggested. Combine a good corrosion coating with some healthy cathodic protection, and you can tremendously increase the lifespan of your infrastructure.

However, there are a lot of snake oil salesmen that try to claim "nano" coatings, when really their just dipping the steel in silane or electroplating it or any number of things that look fancy. They probably do help corrosion, but they are no more "nano" than bailing wire and bubble gum. Unfortunately for them, I'm friends with a PhD in advanced material sciences, and it's pretty easy for her to sift through the BS.

NANO Tech ?

[Crashmarik]

We used to call this physical chemistry. I suppose that doesn't sound as sexy.

Where's the beef?

[Anonymous Coward]

No details of achieved strengths - some maraging steels already Achieve >2GPa strength, and steel wires up to 5GPa, existing steel metallurgy already has methods for creating laminated structures and other high strength nanocomposites (eg look at bainite, pearlite, and other common steel morphologies with microscopic segregated grains of differing composition within the metal structure caused by methods of cooling). Bet anything these are at best only in about the 1-2GPa range - if they were genuinely better they would publish the numbers.

Electrochemical deposition is an incredibly expensive fabrication method, and yet the press release talks of using it in bridges? Some high strength (>1GPa) steels can be manufactured for around $1/kg. Without more concrete data these guys are touting snake oil.

Ten Times More Expensive?

[The_Dougster]

That process, as described, sounds incredibly expensive. I suppose though, if you get the strength of titanium, this might be more economical than using the real thing for large parts. I'm sure that dealing with the waste stream is a major issue, not to mention the energy consumption.

"Up to" 10 x stronger

[Tony Isaac]

That sounds like marketing-speak to me. The "up to" part means it could be 0 x stronger, or 1.1 x stronger, and theoretically (but not likely ever in real life) up to 10 x stronger.

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[GloomE]

Cheaty like refining iron from ore instead of just using the sharp rocks and strong branches you find laying around?

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[frup]

If it's 10x stronger and gets the job done, it solves the problem. Next job is for the quantity surveyor to figure out at which point having 2 or even 10 steel beams is more expensive than shelling out for this premium technology (Or to put it another way, figure out when this technology is cost effective.) If it's using less material, it's likely to be more sustainable too. Did you want them to invent a new element? lol.

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[SeaFox]

So instead of trying to make the drinking straw stronger, we are just wrapping it in cement?

So kinda like spiral-welded pipes (except on the outside)?

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[FatdogHaiku]

If using less materials would be considered "green", then doing so by electroplating would be considered "red"... as in, rhymes with dead... getting rid of heavy metals, nasty solvents, and cyanide can also drive up costs.
http://www.epa.gov/oaqps001/community/details/electroplating_addl_info.html

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[TheLink]

I think the next job would be to see what happens when it starts rusting a bit or gets scratched/nicked or gets heated up or temperature cycled. See how much of the strength is lost.

I wouldn't rely on the material for important stuff till I knew how the material can fail and how well it fails.

*shrug*

[X10]

This was invented long ago, and it's called "Rearden metal".

Re: Potential problem

[Mal-2]

Maybe TFA is bad at conveying what they're doing then, because the impression I got from it was "we have a way to electroplate multiple metals selectively by adjusting the voltage. Doing this enough times can make the bulk material much stronger." If laying down a plating layer nanometers thick is now "manipulating materials on a molecular level", then I can do that in my kitchen with less than $100 in equipment. I believe the thickness of the plating I typically lay down in a single pass is on the scale of four or five atoms, but I make hundreds of small passes, stop, clean, and make hundreds more. If I tank plate rather than brush plate, I don't have as much control, but it could still be done if I had an assistant (robot) to move the parts around for me.

Even if I grant both possibilities in full, how does this make them integral to each other? They could electroplate thousands of thin layers before, it just required moving parts between vats. This is obviously impractical from a human labor perspective, but it may not be substantial at all with machine labor, so it seems they have reduced a cost. They haven't solved a fundamental problem. Would you care to explain, with citations from TFA, how exactly I am clueless?

I know perfectly well how the metal ions deplete from the solution, changing the voltage and time required to get an effective coat. Once they drop below a certain level, it just stops working and throwing more power at it doesn't help. The mixture of solutes would have to be carefully monitored and controlled to prevent this from becoming an issue, at which point it seems simpler to me to use one bath per metal. You can recharge the solutions on a pretty regular basis that way, and not have to do much monitoring at all. You can step up voltage (to a point) to accommodate a weaker solution, without fearing that you're going to attract a different metal. Possibly most important for economy of scale, you can more easily recover the residuals of the spent solution for reprocessing if they haven't all been mixed together.

Stronger? Don't need it. Give me stiffer!

[Overzeetop]

Except in specialized cases for manfacturing and mining, we have all the strength we need in buildings and bridges. What we really want is something with a higher stiffness.

Find me a material which costs the same as A992 steel and has a modulus of elasticity of 300x10^6 psi (10x that of steel) and I'll make you a millionaire. With very few exceptions, MOE scales linearly with mass, from Magnesium to Iridium. Beryllium-Aluminum is an exception, but is very brittle and hella expensive.

Yeah, get me 500ksi steel at $0.60/lb would be nice, but if it still has E=30E3ksi it won't save me much in a building. Give me 50ksi steel with E=300E3ksi and I'll save you at least 20% on the steel tonnage in a structure.