New material - by Haruchai on 17:39 22 Mar 2005
I thought this was very cool. Tell me what you think.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/s...&partner=rssnyt
Quote:
Dr. Vecchio's group has been getting calls from aerospace companies and other businesses fascinated by his reports on a new, extraordinarily hard, strong and tough material whose raw ingredients are aluminum and titanium. When his team gets done with it, the stuff is stiff as steel at half the weight. It is harder than brick. If it cracks, the crack splits into ever smaller cracks that wander about and often fade away, with no shattering.
Dr. Vecchio reports in this month's Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society that it not only makes a good lightweight structural material, it performs "spectacularly" on depth-of-penetration tests - another way to say it stops bullets. (In the lab, a tungsten rod fired at 2,000 miles per hour penetrated only halfway through a three-quarter-inch-thick sheet of Dr. Vecchio's material.)
It also seems to possess qualities needed for lightweight armor and for aerospace applications where strength, low weight and good heat conductivity are at a premium.
Dr. Vecchio is a devotee of biomimetics, or the imitation of life, a growing movement in engineering. Its inspirations to human engineers include bone; porcupine quills; the dry, sticky pads of gecko feet; and the aerodynamics of flies. And seashells. Each has qualities that engineered materials cannot yet equal.
Dr. Vecchio credits his new "metallic-intermetallic laminate" composite to the example provided by abalone nacre, or mother of pearl. Nacre is the iridescent material thickly lining the shells of abalone, shellfish native to the Pacific and resembling flattened snails up to a foot wide and prized for their tasty flesh.
But here is where the genius of living architecture comes in. "When you think about it, an abalone shell is just chalk," Dr. Vecchio said.
It is 95 percent calcium carbonate, one of the most abundant, and weakest, minerals on earth. It is the main ingredient of limestone. Nacre's organic component is similarly fragile. But in a case of the whole outdoing the sum of its parts, nacre multiplies its components' strength dozens of times.
Dr. Vecchio's team set out to make such a composite, alternately stacking thin sheets of aluminum and titanium and pressing them together at about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. The metals react to form a hard, brittle substance resembling a ceramic, called titanium-aluminate. Separating them are thinner layers of flexible titanium.
Under a microscope its layering resembles nacre. It is hard, and cracks are dissipated by the ductile titanium. They are also working with other combinations.
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Next lightweight tank armor? A tungsten rod at 2000mph only penetrates 3/8 of an inch?
I thought this was very cool. Tell me what you think.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/s...&partner=rssnyt
Quote:
Dr. Vecchio's group has been getting calls from aerospace companies and other businesses fascinated by his reports on a new, extraordinarily hard, strong and tough material whose raw ingredients are aluminum and titanium. When his team gets done with it, the stuff is stiff as steel at half the weight. It is harder than brick. If it cracks, the crack splits into ever smaller cracks that wander about and often fade away, with no shattering.
Dr. Vecchio reports in this month's Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society that it not only makes a good lightweight structural material, it performs "spectacularly" on depth-of-penetration tests - another way to say it stops bullets. (In the lab, a tungsten rod fired at 2,000 miles per hour penetrated only halfway through a three-quarter-inch-thick sheet of Dr. Vecchio's material.)
It also seems to possess qualities needed for lightweight armor and for aerospace applications where strength, low weight and good heat conductivity are at a premium.
Dr. Vecchio is a devotee of biomimetics, or the imitation of life, a growing movement in engineering. Its inspirations to human engineers include bone; porcupine quills; the dry, sticky pads of gecko feet; and the aerodynamics of flies. And seashells. Each has qualities that engineered materials cannot yet equal.
Dr. Vecchio credits his new "metallic-intermetallic laminate" composite to the example provided by abalone nacre, or mother of pearl. Nacre is the iridescent material thickly lining the shells of abalone, shellfish native to the Pacific and resembling flattened snails up to a foot wide and prized for their tasty flesh.
But here is where the genius of living architecture comes in. "When you think about it, an abalone shell is just chalk," Dr. Vecchio said.
It is 95 percent calcium carbonate, one of the most abundant, and weakest, minerals on earth. It is the main ingredient of limestone. Nacre's organic component is similarly fragile. But in a case of the whole outdoing the sum of its parts, nacre multiplies its components' strength dozens of times.
Dr. Vecchio's team set out to make such a composite, alternately stacking thin sheets of aluminum and titanium and pressing them together at about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. The metals react to form a hard, brittle substance resembling a ceramic, called titanium-aluminate. Separating them are thinner layers of flexible titanium.
Under a microscope its layering resembles nacre. It is hard, and cracks are dissipated by the ductile titanium. They are also working with other combinations.
----
Next lightweight tank armor? A tungsten rod at 2000mph only penetrates 3/8 of an inch?
New material - by Brad on 20:17 22 Mar 2005
It sounds like science fiction.
It sounds like science fiction.
New material - by draconknight on 19:23 29 Mar 2005
pardon my language Thats Tight(cool)imagine we are getting closer in to the Star trek age.
pardon my language Thats Tight(cool)imagine we are getting closer in to the Star trek age.
New material - by NoonChild on 04:28 30 Mar 2005
I remember back in the early nineties there was a bloke who had developed a really strong heat resistant material which Nasa wanted to test for rocket engines. But the bloke wouldn't tell them how it was made as he wanted to develope it further himself and release it to the world. Sounded quite similar to this stuff but only in an embrionic form. I wonder if he did release his research and this stuff is the refinement of it. Unfortunately I cannot remember this blokes name.
I remember back in the early nineties there was a bloke who had developed a really strong heat resistant material which Nasa wanted to test for rocket engines. But the bloke wouldn't tell them how it was made as he wanted to develope it further himself and release it to the world. Sounded quite similar to this stuff but only in an embrionic form. I wonder if he did release his research and this stuff is the refinement of it. Unfortunately I cannot remember this blokes name.