Glassy Metals - Harder, stronger, and better

[Krell]

Harder, stronger, and better—the material of the future



The wispy metal strip in my hands is 8 inches long, 1 inch wide, and as thin as aluminum foil.

“Try to tear it,” says William Johnson, a materials science professor at Caltech in Pasadena.

I pull—first gently, but soon with all my might. No go.

“See if you can cut this,” suggests Johnson’s postgraduate assistant Jason Kang, handing me a mirror-bright piece of the same metal. It’s an inch long, a quarter inch wide, and thinner than a dime. I bear down with a heavy-duty pair of wire cutters. The metal will not cut. I try again, squeezing with both hands until my fingers ache. Nothing.

But the most amazing act in this show is yet to come.

“Watch,” says Johnson. From a height of about two feet, he drops a steel ball onto a brick-size chunk of the metal. The ball bounces so high and for so long—1 minute and 17 seconds, with a metronomic tick, tick, tick—that it looks unreal, like some kind of cinematic special effect. “When you try that with regular steel, it goes ‘clunk, clunk, clunk’ and stops,” says Johnson. If the metal were glued to an unyielding surface such as concrete (instead of sitting on Johnson’s oak coffee table, which absorbs a lot of the energy), “the ball would bounce for more than two minutes,” he says. “I’ve done it.”

It’s all astounding, yet oddly familiar. In the typical science fiction film circa 1950, there’s that scene in which scientists return from the just-landed flying saucer and tell the Army brass that no tool known to humankind can cut, burn, bend, or otherwise scar the hull.

But the metal in front of me is decidedly terrestrial in origin—it was developed in Pasadena, specifically in the lab down the hall from Johnson’s office.

It is called metallic glass, or amorphous metal, and it appears to be nothing less than an entirely new class of material that can be used to build lighter, stronger versions of anything. “Everything from an Abrams tank to an F-16 jet to a bicycle can be made out of this, and because it is two to three times the strength of conventional alloys, you can halve the weight or more. That’s not evolutionary, it’s revolutionary,” says Johnson. “This is the structural material of the future.”

Strength is not its only virtue. It can also be formed like a plastic. So instead of laboriously making sheet metal and then cutting, machining, and drilling, say, a car fender, all of which weakens the part, a glassy metal fender could be injection-molded in one piece—a breakthrough. “The idea that you can cast something like a plastic part with very high strength is a completely new development,” says materials science professor William Nix of Stanford University, an adviser to Liquidmetal Technologies, which is trying to commercialize the metal.


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[fleecy]

vitreous metal that's pliable and durable- amazing.

[Jared Moya]

Very cool story.......nice to see you back in the S & T forum :)

[mountain_rage]

This is pretty cool, the current material engineering comming out lately is really fascinating.

Theres a company that can artificially create perfect diamonds at a very low cost, they want to use the technology to make transitors to push computer processor power even further.

Then if you look at alot of other developement people are also creating super strong threads, smart materials that act like slime(flows when moved gently hardens when suddenly struck).

Its all just crazy, we are on the brink of some very cool technology.

[Krell]

Yeah really cool.

My initial thoughts are using ceramics and tungsten carbide in conjunction with this process, and then supercooling them to further concentrate and align the molecules.

Being able to spew this out in a web like lambs wool would also gives us a stronger net to catch space debris with. Drag it though the atmosphere and eventually plunge it back to earth over a deserted area.

This same weave may afford UV shielding, RF filtering and an ultra-light filler\frame that can be used to construct housing etc on other tera.

(I should be rich by now)

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[silentscream]

all this may help with the geostationary space lift ideas

i love the thought of that

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[Jared Moya]

Or how about this info,

"It can also be formed like a plastic. So instead of laboriously making sheet metal and then cutting, machining, and drilling, say, a car fender, all of which weakens the part, a glassy metal fender could be injection-molded in one piece—a breakthrough."

Can make objects and shapes that just cant be made using steel.