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New Alloy Bounces Back Into Shape 10 Million Times And Counting

Posted by timothy on from the bouncy-bouncy dept.

wrp103 links to the BBC's report of a newly engineered alloy that returns to its original shape after deformation even after 10 million cycles more than 10 million times. From the article: "Memory shape alloys" like this have many potential uses, but present incarnations are prone to wearing out. The new material — made from nickel, titanium and copper — shatters previous records and is so resilient it could be useful in artificial heart valves, aircraft components or a new generation of solid-state refrigerators." (Original article in Science Magazine.)

37 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by cduffy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We can make modern flex nibs better than the old ones!

    (Good flexible fountain pen nibs are pretty much all circa 1950s or prior right now; it's a sad, sad state of affairs).

    1. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by SeaFox · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Did something change in the late '50s (like material or manufacturing laws) that resulted in poorer quality nibs after that point?

    2. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      When the ballpoint pen came out, Fountain pen makers tried to compete with things like lifetime warranties. Flex nibs, when flexed too far, can spring and not bounce back. When made of expensive metals (14k gold for flex nibs), it made lifetime warranties pretty expensive for the manufacturers to have to replace nibs that people ruin. Saying no to replacing a nib wouldn't go over well, because most people can't admit that they mis-used something. So, to make the warranties stick and to not piss people off, things had to made more durable, i.e. not flexy.

      It got worse when people grew up on ballpoint pens and would buy pens as adults. Ballpoint users are used to pressing hard. Pressing hard can damage nibs. Then we ended up with the ridiculously hard nails of today.

      In addition, some countries (esp. France) regulated the amount of gold has to be in something to call it "gold". Flex pens should be made of 14k, but the French, in their infinite wisdom, made it 18k. That's far too soft for a flex nib, since there isn't enough memory. (And there are even some folks who make 21k nibs, which are just silly)

      Nib metals also need to not corrode too, hence why it's still pretty much stainless steel (which doesn't flex well) or gold (better for corrosion, but18k is too soft). Since there are so few of us who like flexy nibs, it's not worth the research and tooling to figure out new types of nibs. (They've tried titanium, but it's just not that great)

    3. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by Bathroom+Humor · · Score: 1

      Everybody loves a good nib.

    4. Re: Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Just a somewhat informed user. The pen people wouldn't call me a collector. I only have a dozen pens...

      To learn about nibs, check out Richard Binder's website. He just semi-retired as a professional nib-meister, but has kept his reference materials up. He's of the rare breed of a master craftsman with encyclopedic knowledge and a desire to teach rather than be superior. A few pages that answer the question better than I did:
      http://www.richardspens.com/?page=ref/ttp/materials.htm - nib materials
      http://www.richardspens.com/?page=ref/ttp/disaster.htm - springing a nib

    5. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      flexible fountain pen

      I'm left handed you insensitive clod.

    6. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by cduffy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      please enlighten us as to why the fountain pin and/or feathered quill is superior to the free pens I get from the bank?

      Y'know, I actually don't mind giving this a serious answer.

      You don't need pressure to write with a fountain pen -- at all. (The modern competitor is a rollerball, not a ballpoint; rollerballs don't give you amount of flexibility on nib grind or opportunities for flex and shading effects that you get with a fountain, but at least you're not forced to use tons of pressure). Allows different, more comfortable grips.

      Also, they're refillable with water-based inks -- meaning that they're not disposable, and that you have a huge amount of choice in terms of color and properties of your ink. Want an ink that's still viscous in below-freezing weather? I've got a bottle on my desk! Want an ink that changes from yellow to red depending on how much you're putting down on the paper? That too! Want an ink that responds to ultraviolet and is completely waterproof you can mix in with other inks that are water-soluable, so you can see where writing that's been washed away used to be under a blacklight?

      Lots of room for geekery. :)

    7. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Regular Nitinol (super elastic, not SMA) can do 10 million cycles, no big deal. This is different, it's a shape memory alloy, which means that it's shape is returned by thermal cycling, and Nitinol (shape memory, not SE) can only do a few cycles before becoming permanently deformed.

      Nitinol SE is pretty amazing stuff, I use it in nano positioning fixtures as a flexural bearing after Dan Gelbart showed me the technique. It has as far as I can tell perfect repeatability. The only trouble with Nitinol is it's a pain to work with, it's difficult to cut, it can't be welded, soldering to it doesn't work, so you basically have to clamp it between a spot weld, or glue it in with epoxy. It's also expensive as hell. 1kg of it will easily cost you over $10k. Luckily you can use tiny strips to accomplish a lot.

    8. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by cduffy · · Score: 1

      Tried Parker Quink, or the Noodler's Bernanke series? Both are quick-drying.

      I'm actually a right-handed overwriter (rare thing that is), so I feel at least some subset of your pain.

    9. Re:Heart valves? Refrigerators? Pah! by rdnetto · · Score: 1

      You don't need pressure to write with a fountain pen -- at all. (The modern competitor is a rollerball, not a ballpoint; rollerballs don't give you amount of flexibility on nib grind or opportunities for flex and shading effects that you get with a fountain, but at least you're not forced to use tons of pressure). Allows different, more comfortable grips.

      I'll second this - using a fountain pen is worth it just for the ergonomics alone. Before I used (not inexpensive) rollerballs, and even then my hand would be hurting after a test or exam, but with a fountain pen I could easily write for more than double the time. It also worked out cheaper too - a $10 bottle of ink with a $20 pen lasted me the duration of my 6 year course, and the bottle is only half-empty.

      --
      Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
  2. "a new generation of solid-state refrigerators." by Nutria · · Score: 1

    Someone isn't considering how incredibly expensive that a copper+titanium refrigerator will be.

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  3. 1947... by kiphat · · Score: 1

    Anyone remember Roswell, NM?

    1. Re:1947... by RubberDogBone · · Score: 1

      Anyone remember Roswell, NM?

      My first thought exactly. So it took us 60 years or so to figure it out.

      "it was a sheet of metal, very light weight, but you could crush it up like a ball and it would bounce right back no matter what you did, and it would not cut or burn"

      --
      Sig for hire.
    2. Re:1947... by peragrin · · Score: 1

      Well considering that the scanning electron microscope wasn't developed until the late 60's and it took 30 additional years to make a decent one it makes sense.

      I dare you take a modern computer tablet back to 1947 and ask them to make sense of it. I bet they struggle just to keep the battery charged.

      Now you want to figure out anti grav?

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    3. Re:1947... by mikael · · Score: 1

      "it was a sheet of metal, very light weight, but you could crush it up like a ball and it would bounce right back no matter what you did, and it would not cut or burn"

      I Remember that description. It's always fascinated how UFO reports seem to reflect future technology, even if it was someone tripping out, writing a sci-fi story rather being a real event. Eric von Daniken proposed the idea of quadrocopters, while others propose the idea of 360 panoramic flight decks.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    4. Re:1947... by matfud · · Score: 1

      It is far easier to imagine something then it is to make that imagination come to life and actually work.

    5. Re:1947... by RubberDogBone · · Score: 1

      Oh no, I'm totally willing to cut some slack. This stuff is not easy, be it reverse engineering OR inventing it with original research.

      We're on the edge of unlocking a whole new realm of material science where we can do things that would have looked like magic even 50 years ago. Alien or not, this does show that science can do a lot in a very short period of time.

      --
      Sig for hire.
    6. Re:1947... by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Actually the magic here is we can do stuff like this far better than we used to be able to do 50 years ago.

    7. Re:1947... by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Here's a bit on the first commercial shape-memory alloy with a fair bit explaining how they are driven by phase transformations - cool stuff.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium

  4. Why no video? by dastardlydavros · · Score: 2

    Scientists: Hey guys we've invented this amazing new thing!
    Me: Cool, let's see a video of it in action.
    Scientists: Pfft! We've done one better than that - we've written a paper on it instead.
    Me: Gaahhhhh!!!

    1. Re:Why no video? by SeaFox · · Score: 1

      Yes, a video of a piece of metal bending... and returning to its original shape.
      Bending... and returning to it's original shape.

      Just keep watching... after another 9,999,998 times we think it might do something different.

    2. Re:Why no video? by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Probably because they don't know what to call it yet.

      Nitinol was just fine, but C*ntinol would probably not go over well.

      No, wait... that would be nitrogen. I bet they're thinking it, though.

  5. So... by willworkforbeer · · Score: 1

    A step closer to Rearden Metal?

    --
    Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
  6. More needed to be used as a heart valve by backslashdot · · Score: 1

    Ok lets say it has to be a permanent heart valve.

    For math ease, let's say a heart beats at 60 beats per minute (once per second .. though average resting heart rates are usually a little faster than that).

    So to calculate how many days it will take to go through 10 million cycles we do Number of cycles / (Hours in a day x Minutes in an hour x Beats in a minute) = 10,000,000 / (24 x 60 x 60) = 10,000,000 / 86,400 = 115.74 = about 116 days .. nearly 4 months.

    So unless they can get say 100 million or more out of it I don't think this will find much use outside of a temporary heart valve.

    1. Re:More needed to be used as a heart valve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They did testing of 10 million cycles and checked for fatigue in the metal - they found only negligible changes, that indicates the metal changes. So while 10 million is what has been tested, the results indicate that it should be able to continue on for a significantly higher number of cycles.

    2. Re:More needed to be used as a heart valve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not necessarily. It's a simple matter to run a series of test to failure at varying stresses to determine fatigue life. Then we can employee Miner's rule to predict fatigue damage for a variety of applications for this new material.

    3. Re:More needed to be used as a heart valve by whit3 · · Score: 1

      Ok lets say it has to be a permanent heart valve. So to calculate how many days it will take to go through 10 million cycles ...nearly 4 months. So unless they can get say 100 million or more out of it I don't think this will find much use outside of a temporary heart valve.

      That was ten million THERMAL cycles, where a thermal pulse was used to reset the material to its exact original shape. It can flex thousands of times, weaken, then one thermal cycle can restore it to its original shape (reset it, in other words). It can't be intended to thermal-cycle as fast as one heartbeat, certainly!

      It's unclear how the heat is applied inside a living body, and unclear what structure made of the alloy makes it good heart-valve material (is it a flap, smart hinge, an adjustable spring, or a motor?).

  7. Re:Finally! by careysub · · Score: 1

    That's blernsball you twit!

    --
    Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
  8. Re:That's more than 100 trillion cycles! by jtara · · Score: 1

    Darn it! Beat me to it!

    Or OP has a stutter...

  9. Indestructible eyeglass frames! by frankenpc510 · · Score: 1

    I've used Flexon frames in the past, but they tend to be heavy. I wonder if this material is lighter.

  10. Heat engines by Anonanonaon · · Score: 1

    I've always wondered why we don't see any applications using Nitinol.

    The stuff has been around since the 70's. It looks really useful and powerful.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    1. Re:Heat engines by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      And the answer is: reliability! From the wikipedia article:

      Fatigue failures of nitinol devices are a constant subject of discussion. Because it is the material of choice for applications requiring enormous flexibility and motion (e.g., peripheral stents and heart valves), it is necessarily exposed to much greater fatigue strains than are other metals. While the strain-controlled fatigue performance of nitinol is superior to all other known metals, fatigue failures have been observed in the most demanding applications. There is a great deal of effort underway trying to better understand and define the durability limits of nitinol.

      I'm betting the reason we haven't heard of these wonderful heat engines mentioned in that 1970's era video is because the nitinol [wikipedia.org] probably tended to break after a few million flexes, which doesn't make for a good, long-term, reliable engine. BTW, we DO actually have many nitinol-based products (see the article). Just not the heat engines.

      It could very well be that this discovery pushes memory shape alloy heat engines into the realm of the practical instead of the hypothetical or experimental.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  11. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  12. At the risk of being mundane... by jpellino · · Score: 1

    bed springs?

    --
    "Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
    1. Re:At the risk of being mundane... by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Springs in general only bend a tiny bit on any particular part that is why they are so reliable. If you take a spring and bend it at one point say with two needle nose pliers. It will not spring back, but you will have a bent spring.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  13. Screwed Again! by JimSadler · · Score: 1

    Really wonderful memory metals have been around for at least 25 years now. Industry really wanted the public to not get products containing memory metal all these years. About the only common use of memory metal that the public can find are the wires in womens' bras that return to shape when placed in the hot water of a washing machine. the chances are that we will see very few products containing memory metal as the stuff threatens to many large industries. For example you could have a car that self removed dents if exposed to either heat or cold.

  14. Other uses by 7-Vodka · · Score: 1
    Screw the fridges and heart valves.

    Give me pogo sticks and super shoes.

    Make me a set of oscar pistorious legs and some type of new car suspension.

    --

    Liberty.