I'm placing my order for a # 2 General Product's hull today !
Posted on 10/01/2005 6:10:57 PM PDT by strategofr
Every time an astronaut gets off the ground, he or she owes a debt to the Wright brothers, not just because the boys dared to fly, but because they were smart enough to use a newfangled aluminum alloy to lighten the load of their engine and make flight possible.
The art and science of creating new, lighter and stronger metal alloys has progressed remarkably in the intervening 100 years. But many scientists now envision a looming limit to this progress owing to a mature science that will now make only incremental gains.
Then along comes Takashi Saito, a Japanese researcher who appears to have shattered the glass ceiling on metal-alloy development limitations.
Saito, of the Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories, and his colleagues have jettisoned the traditional art approach to alloy development -- the trial and error used at Kitty Hawk and everywhere since -- and turned to pure science, specifically quantum mechanics and high-powered computer computation, to create new mixtures of metal which, one outside scientist says, have spectacular properties of strength and flexibility.
In the April 17 issue of the journal Science, Saito's team writes that their titanium-based alloys exhibit "super" properties, such as ultrahigh strength and super elasticity. The new materials could prove useful for spaceflight, where precision operations are conducted in ruthless conditions.
The alloys approach "magic" upper property limits that previous methods could not attain, the scientists say.
Alloys of myriad mixings are used in various parts on satellites, deep space probes and the shuttle fleet. The new alloys could be particularly suitable for ultralightweight springs, as one example, or other "precision instruments for use in rugged environments such as in outer space," the researchers report.
To develop an alloy, researchers add one ore more so-called solute elements to a metallic solvent, such as aluminum or titanium, explains Gary Shiflet, who wrote an analysis of the new results for the journal. But there is a practically infinite number of possible atomic combinations that, in the end, result in wildly differing structural properties.
Saito's group has made "major advances in specific material properties that would be exceedingly difficult to achieve by trial and error," says Shiflet, who works in materials science and engineering at the University of Virginia.
The result, Shiflet says, is an alloy with "spectacular properties" and the promise of materials that "may have the strength to carry a load and be able to perform another distinctive capacity, such as sensing damage and perhaps even repairing themselves."
Shiflet said the discovery, and the computer work that drove it, are incentives for other researchers to concoct new metal mixtures.
Why not water? Water in special compartments?
Sapphire is Al2O3, as is Alumina.
Ah, so. Someone has finally figured out what the gray's are using to build their flying saucers.
And motorists... among them some Freepers... will still flip us the bird for having the gall to ride on THEIR roads.
I wouldn't want to ride it across a bridge.
Accidental discoveries – like LSD as a better aspirin?
MSGT,
You may not be an engineer, but you have a better knack for it than most engineers I've worked with.
I think you're exactly right. Nice ideas.
VX , I assume you mean the nerve gas, is an organo-phosphate.
Does that mean Toyota will be 'strongest built cars on the road'?
Great, now you can get rid of your 329, 'cause the new version will only be 5 ounces!
Or be blown over byy a wind gust
I also ride a bike a lot. For every jerk in a car, I have found about 100 jerks on bikes. They are even jerks to other bicyclists. The bike paths I am referring to are separate from the road about 40 ft into a park. They run parallel to the road and go the same place the road does. Still we get a large number of in your face I am going to ride my bike on the road even if it kills both of us folks all the time. Me, I ride my bike on the bike path. It is a whole lot safer and more pleasant.
My first intro to the jerk on a bicycle mentality was in Berkeley, which I think still has the highest concentration. Riding a bicycle the wrong way down the middle of a 5 lane one-way street is to me the height of arrogance. The road running the other direction was one block over.
"lighter planes and rockets... stronger lighter armor plating"
Those seem like the most likely to have a big impact. In addition, perhaps troops could wear metal flack jackets.
"Smart@ss that I was (and probably still am, come to think of it) I said "oh, yeah?""
LOL!
"Still haven't made it thorough Trig, though."
That's the one I hated the most. I took 1st year calculus 3 times---once in high school and twice in college. That was the end of my math quest.
I did have one amazing experience with math, though. As a college freshman, I had to interview an adviser to try to get into "honors calculus." By chance, the person I was interviewing was the teacher of "super honors calculus". This consists of one freshman class (about 30 students)out of all the freshman in the University of Michigan.
This guy concluded that I was smart (which was true) and also concluded that I could do math at a very high level (which turned out not to be true). So, I spent the first half of the first semester of my freshman year trying to solve problems such as: Prove that 1 + 1 = 2. After half a semester, I had failed to solve a single homework problem. I dropped the course.
I made the mistake of trying to take College Algebra and Trig at the same time. I got a B in Algebra, (after 15 semester hours of remedial math classes) but at the 10-week point, I was finally getting the stuff from the first 5 weeks of the trig class. I got a 34% on the final exam, and that was one of my higher grades...
I'll take trig again, some day, but not when I'm taking ANYTHING else.
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