On the flip side, that chart on the elasticity of this material couldn't be much more confusing. This is not a measure of ductility, but in fact a measure of "springiness" the amount of deformation the material can take without deforming.
A plain carbon steel will provide 25% elongation to rupture, where as hi-tensile, high carbon steels (like rebar) can only achieve 10% elongation to rupture. This is the trade off. But it is hard for me to imagine that only .5 percent of this strain is below the yield strength, so I am scratching my head too. On the surface this chart would seem to imply that all of these metals are fairly brittle, and I just don't get that. Maybe I got up on the wrong side of the bed.
Yea, ok maybe Sword spends his weekends beating plowshares into blades. ;-) If he does, more power to him. The world neds more people who know how to make fine weapons.
My beef here wasn’t about the liquid part of the technology. I can see the upside to that straight away. The issue I had was the idea that Apple was solving some strength or ding resistance problem with this material. There really isn’t any problem with aluminum in this regard, and there is always titanium for the yuppie poseurs who want to one-up the rest of us mere mortals packing aluminum-cased Macbook Pro’s.
FWIW, I’m an Apple user, own two Macs, wife owns one, we will be buying more in the future. So I’m not some Apple basher, but I’ve been around Apple since the Apple II, so Steve’s Reality Distortion Field rarely works on me any more.
The one downside of this type of material I’ve read about is that the lack of plastic deformation means that you get little to no warning before yield failure. It seems like the ultimate in a work-hardening failure.
I could foresee a problem with this property in a small widget that gets dropped repeatedly, then one day the case shatters. An aluminum or stainless case would dent or scratch, but not shatter on the (eg) 50th drop.
The other issue I could foresee is in laptops with hard disks. If one dropped a laptop encased in this type of material such that it bounced really well, that’s going to drastically increase the G-loads a hard disk needs to withstand w/o crashing the head.
Yes, I've made swords. But it was about 42 years ago. . . and they just had to produce a suitable "CLANG!" when struck together, so the nature of the steel was of little importance. They were for my college drama department. They needed about 40. I cut them out of 1 1/4" x 3/16" x 36" steel bar stock, added welded on 1/2" x 6" x 1/8" cross guard to each side 6" from the bottom, added a weded on 1 1/4" round button pommel, glued on wooden grips, wrapped that with black duct tape, ground the end to a dull point — voilà! Fairly safe stage Swords with suitable "CLANG!" It took me about a week to turn out 40 of them. We bought some fancier ones for the principal actors.
I studied a lot about the physics and chemistry of metals in college. But that was also 40 years ago and mostly theoretical. Now I work for an implant dentist who was an aerospace engineer. He is very much into materials science and knows quite a bit about these liquid metals. He developed many of the modern techniques used in dental implantology and is always looking for lighter, stronger cartable metals for such uses.
Getting back to swords, and sword making, I've also collected edged weaponry and studied their manufacture and know quite a bit about steel and the trade offs between strength, spring, hardness, the ability to hold an edge, etc. Read about the construction of Japanese swords sometimes and the folding of the metal in the various layers that goes into a katana and the qualities each part of the interior and exterior metals of the sword provides to the overall finished product. Created through empirical trial and error over centuries of sword making, the results of fine Samurai blade technology still challenge the efforts of modern metallurgy to duplicate.