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.
Rockwell hardness scale rating.
There's a fairly high limit on how light you want a vehicle to be. As things stand now, a strong wind can buffet my 3700-pound station wagon. If a car really doesn't weigh very much, its stability in a crosswind is decreased.
When can I get a Golf Club made of this stuff...
Well, obey the rules of the road. No tandem riding, stopping at red lights and stop signs and using turn signals. Maybe then you and others will get a little respect.
22 April 2003, 2 1/2 years ago? This should be on cars now.
Carbon fiber is better. More of a whipping action.
Oh... ride with traffic. Too many idiots going against the flow.
The alloys are strong yet unusually elastic, so they can deform more than other alloys and still return to their original shape. Engineers can also readily mold or bend the materials at room temperature into various shapes, a property called superplasticity.The materials also possess two characteristics desirable in machine parts that experience wild fluctuations in temperature, such as those in a spacecraft. While most metals expand with any rise in temperature, the new alloys expand very little between –200°C and 300°C. Moreover, conventional alloys deform different amounts at different temperatures, but the new materials show about the same deformation whether it's –200°C or 300°C.
Crosswinds.
Forgot about wind...semi-truck suction, etc.
'Course, if these newer alloys are 'flexible' as stated, hehe, maybe they could sorta bend (?) with the wind in ways that make the wind flow over and around easily? I mean, this article indicates such metals could one day sense danger, and could possible 'heal themselves'---wild, weird and really hard to imagine.
What's the point of having this stuff in my SUV if I won't be able to crush little precious hippie "cars?"
LOL! I use that term sometimes. It dates us. Does your's have faux wood panelling?
And motorcycles. Could you imagine a 150 lb. Hog?
Does anybody know anything about that?
LOL
"There's a fairly high limit on how light you want a vehicle to be. As things stand now, a strong wind can buffet my 3700-pound station wagon. If a car really doesn't weigh very much, its stability in a crosswind is decreased."
I'm not an engineer, although I once wanted to be one, but wouldn't lighter, stronger alloys be useful to make the parts necessary to creat such a light-weight and strong car, while allowing us to use "lesser" metals (like old wheel weights, for example) to ballast the car down low, lowering its center of gravity, thus making it more stable? It would be a problem if the ballast could shift, but surely we could solve that problem, too. Epoxy, for example, or even rivits. Bolt-on weights would be easily removable, so maybe you could take them off, tip the car up on it's side, and work on it that way?
You'll have to compensate for lack of mass with increased velocity.
Maybe even a dynamically adjustable center of mass.
"I think the Rockwell scale is used to measure hardness of metals"
thanks.
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