Nanotech Makes Steel 10x Stronger 106
An anonymous reader writes: A new metal-making process currently in testing at oil fields uses nano-scale plating to make metals like steel as much as ten times stronger than they would be without it. "[The process] uses an advanced form of electroplating, a process already used to make the chrome plating you might see on the engine and exhaust pipes of a motorcycle. Electroplating involves immersing a metal part in a chemical bath containing various metal ions, and then applying an electrical current to cause those ions to form a metal coating. The company uses a bath that contains more than one kind of metal ion and controls how ions are deposited by varying the electrical current. By changing the current at precise moments, it can create a layered structure, with each layer being several nanometers thick and of different composition. The final coating can be up to a centimeter thick and can greatly change the properties of the original material."
Star Trek did it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Lt. Barclay: Commander, this is what we're thinking of using to replace the damaged warp plasma conduit.
Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge: [examines the unit] Yeah, Reg... yeah, that's good. But you're going to need to reinforce this copper tubing with a nanopolymer.
http://vignette3.wikia.nocooki... [nocookie.net]
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Wow, a show in the future mentioned a nifty future idea without doing any of the heavy lifting. Who da thunk it!
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I think theres a slight difference between "multi-layer" and polymer.
Actually theyre almost antonyms.
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Yeah sure, whatever. Just re-modulate the shields frequency and we're good to go.
Approaching the problem from the outside in. (Score:1)
It's an interesting concept, but it seems a little "cheaty" to me. We'll see where it goes I guess.
Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's 10x stronger and gets the job done, it solves the problem. Next job is for the quantity surveyor to figure out at which point having 2 or even 10 steel beams is more expensive than shelling out for this premium technology (Or to put it another way, figure out when this technology is cost effective.) If it's using less material, it's likely to be more sustainable too. Did you want them to invent a new element? lol.
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http://www.epa.gov/oaqps001/community/details/electroplating_addl_info.html [epa.gov]
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I wouldn't rely on the material for important stuff till I knew how the material can fail and how well it fails.
Cars (Score:2)
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"High strength steels of the past ten years have brought better gas mileage without compromise"
Cars are _still_ significantly heavier than they were 15-16 years ago. It seems that every time a new method make the vehicle stronger with the same mass, they keep the mass and add strength.
Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in. (Score:5, Interesting)
So instead of trying to make the drinking straw stronger, we are just wrapping it in cement?
So kinda like spiral-welded pipes [youtube.com] (except on the outside)?
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"So instead of trying to make the drinking straw stronger, we are just wrapping it in cement?"
Exactly my thoughts. 1cm is a bit much, so why not remove the steel (straw) afterwards and use only the remaining strong stuff?
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Presumably you would start with a thinner piece of metal. If you reduce your 8cm diameter piece of metal to 2cm core +1cm thick coating and it's still the same structural properties, that's a net 4cm reduction in diameter on your structural piece.
Also i doubt all application use a 1cm coating. That was the maximum the method can achieve not the minimum needed for a useful result.
Ob SF. (Score:2, Interesting)
A. E. Van Vogt's classic SF novel "Slan" had a major plot point centering on "10 point steel". Perhaps we've finally implemented his vision...
Ten times stronger? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been rummaging around their website, and can only find references to corrosion resistance. That a specially-plated metal is more corrosion resistant I can easily believe.
But 10x stronger? That seems a bit... hard to believe.
Does plating a piece of steel really multiply the yield strength by 10x? Any materials scientists want to comment on this?
Also, how does a 1cm coating fare during changes in temperature? Will the coating peel off due to thermal expansion/contraction of the underlying metal?
I couldn't find any supporting scientific studies.
Is this for real?
Re:Ten times stronger? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was gonna post the same thing. The article is pretty devoid of details and mentions nothing about tensile and compressive strength.
All it pretty much says is improved corrosion resistance and this short paragraph:
"David Lashmore, a professor of materials science at the University of New Hampshire who has conducted work in the area, says nano-engineered layers can make a material stronger by stopping cracks from moving through it."
So it sounds like it 'holds' the metal together from micro fractures but it says nothing about taking on the applied forces which would make it actually stronger.
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Re:Ten times stronger? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Aren't the nanoscale structures of carbon more interesting?
Carbon seems to be stronger and lighter than iron. Why do we even mix the two together?
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seriously though, http://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki... [wikibooks.org] if you had a 'perfect' crystal of metal, such as is common microscopically, the strength of pure metals is around 1000x that of actual samples due to defects. Basically defects pre-stretch the bonds removing most of the ne
Re:Ten times stronger? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it does make sense small cracks do concentrate stresses at the head of the V which break through the crystal structure a layer at a time.
As a simple demo get a piece of paper and pull on it, you will find it pretty hard to tear it , now just nick the edge of the paper and try again, you should find it yields quite easily.
The tensile strength of steel would be a lot higher if it wasn't full of imperfections. incidentally there are two crystal structures you get with steel face centered cubic and body centered cubic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
now the interesting thing about this is that when you cool down steel rapidly you get one form and slowly you get the other form so if your quenching something more than a foot thick you get both types of crystals since heat just isn't removed fast enough from the centre. the larger crystal structure is in the centre and the smaller crystal structure is on the outside. This means the inside is trying to be bigger than the outside. so the outer surfaces are massively stressed. like a bomb stressed seriously. You can't cut through steel stressed like this with a saw as the cutting would unbalance the stresses and it would blow apart, so you have to do something called plunge grinding which is done in a massive lathe with a grinding wheel taking it down equally on all sides.
This is what happens when you produce a roll for a cold rolling mill the outside is very hard with a softer core. Usually the forces are lower than the uts of the steel but sometimes it isn't and you get catastrophic failures. generally this happens in the quenching tank where its safe you normally hear a few bangs as lumps of steel spawl off from the outside followed by a boom as the roll breaks apart and goes crashing down to the bottom of the tank.
Rarely they fail after the heat treatment, joe the hardness tester where i used to work was nearly killed by one. he'd hardness tested it around 12pm (the hardness was abnormally high around 890 vickers) an hour later it blew apart a ton and a half of journal end was launched across the factory floor missing his legs by inches. he was off work for a week after with the shock. We also had a used roll blow up in a storage warehouse one weekend and it took a wall out, this had been in service and had been worn down to below a serviceable size. Even after all that time it was still stressed ...
back on topic , it seems reasonable that by removing the sites for cracks to occur the uts of the steel will be much higher, normally the way round the problem is to make the thing bigger that way the forces applied will not break the cross section of course that makes it heavier and harder to work with which is why its a specialized area like drilling where this has been applied, with the plating thicknesses used the cost will be way higher than for the regular steel pipes, i'd expect probably more than 10x the cost but the rig would be able to drill deeper and that's what matters, and the return on that makes the drilling costs look like peanuts.
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you have to do something called plunge grinding
Plunge grinding was only legalised in the UK in 1952, and those prosecuted were all posthumously pardoned by the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, in 2007.
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must mean something different outside of yorkshire
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They have been laminating other materials for years now and it makes them stronger. I'm not sure exactly what here is supposed to do it though. But take a bow and arrow for instance. They can take two or even three different types of wood laminated together and get 100lbs pull weight or more but each individual wood would either snap or be too flexible and not have as much power by itself.
I imagine it is somewhat along the same lines as that or even how some japanese swords use two types of metal to increas
Re:Ten times stronger? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nearly anything becomes economical if you can automate it and scale it up large enough. We'll have to see how the testing process goes first, I'd think. Civil engineering is a pretty conservative field, for very good reasons. At the scale we're making things nowadays, you need to be really, really certain about the properties of your building materials, and how it will hold up for the next fifty years under stress. I'd imagine they'll go through many years of testing and deploying in relatively small sc
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There are already options in concrete reinforcing that are significantly more corrosion resistant than standard rebar that are not used because they are more expensive at the initial phase. For example using stainless steel rebar in a port or seawall structure is done and easily available. However I know of many projects where it is not used because the initial cost is higher. This is despite it being only 20 years before stainless moves into the lead on cost due to significantly lower maintenance and th
Re:Ten times stronger? (Score:4, Informative)
As a corrosion coatings engineer, I can tell you that this already happens. It's the whole reason I have a job. You see those green pipes going down the road on a flatbed truck? That's fusion bonded epoxy (powder coating) on plain jane steel pipes. There are several places that FBE coat their rebar before putting it in concrete structures, like you suggested. Combine a good corrosion coating with some healthy cathodic protection, and you can tremendously increase the lifespan of your infrastructure.
However, there are a lot of snake oil salesmen that try to claim "nano" coatings, when really their just dipping the steel in silane or electroplating it or any number of things that look fancy. They probably do help corrosion, but they are no more "nano" than bailing wire and bubble gum. Unfortunately for them, I'm friends with a PhD in advanced material sciences, and it's pretty easy for her to sift through the BS.
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Does plating a piece of steel really multiply the yield strength by 10x? Any materials scientists want to comment on this? Well it depends on exactly how they layer on their other layers. Normally steel has a certain standard crystalline structure (cast steel and it always arranges itself in this way). But just look at carbon that is arranged in different structures. Carbon arranged in a 2d structure makes a material called graphite: the softest mineral known. Carbon arranged in a 3d structure is calle
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Clearly they mean the same kind of strength as you see in all those scientifically proven hair products :).
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Hi,
a PhD in material science from 2001 (but that's very rusty by now).
If we're talking about tensile strength and non-exotic materials (i.e. not graphene[1]), the strength is
predominantly determined by the bulk properties of a material. E.g., in a metal, it's the electronic
band structure (a nearly free electron gas). This is changed very little with a traditional coating,
which only affetcs the outermost atomic layers of the material. There just isn't enough material
at the surface of have an impact on the wh
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That's the awesome thing about saying something is stronger. Without qualifying that as what type of "strong" they are talking about, it can be anything! Tensile strength? Yield strength? Sheer strength? Ductility? Wear resistance? Corrosion resistance? It's all covered!
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Yielding is a statistical process. If the layers are actually isolated then I guess you could have failure in one layer that doesn't propagate to the next. Similar to first ply failure with composites. Theoretically perfect metals are much stronger than what we can make because of these failures. So maybe that is what they are claiming? By producing metal this way you will have less flaws and those that exist will only fail locally and not cause failure across the specimen?
NANO Tech ? (Score:5, Insightful)
We used to call this physical chemistry. I suppose that doesn't sound as sexy.
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Marketing has infected the world. Why just describe what you're doing when you can toss out a few buzzwords and get a lot more attention?
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Nope Blacksmiths were early NANO TECH engineers.
Look at their control of Pearlite and Bainite microstructures.
Potential problem (Score:2)
Having done electroplating myself, though only on a small scale, I have noticed that sometimes applying an excessively high voltage doesn't make the solute metal ions stop attaching, it just makes them bring along some "scum" along with them. Most notably, throwing too much voltage at silver solution produces a black scum which must be cleaned off before anything else (including more silver) will stick. I have to imagine other metals have the same problem.
If one ion truly prefers a given voltage and sticks
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Maybe TFA is bad at conveying what they're doing then, because the impression I got from it was "we have a way to electroplate multiple metals selectively by adjusting the voltage. Doing this enough times can make the bulk material much stronger." If laying down a plating layer nanometers thick is now "manipulating materials on a molecular level", then I can do that in my kitchen with less than $100 in equipment. I believe the thickness of the plating I typically lay down in a single pass is on the scale of
Where's the beef? (Score:4, Informative)
No details of achieved strengths - some maraging steels already Achieve >2GPa strength, and steel wires up to 5GPa, existing steel metallurgy already has methods for creating laminated structures and other high strength nanocomposites (eg look at bainite, pearlite, and other common steel morphologies with microscopic segregated grains of differing composition within the metal structure caused by methods of cooling). Bet anything these are at best only in about the 1-2GPa range - if they were genuinely better they would publish the numbers.
Electrochemical deposition is an incredibly expensive fabrication method, and yet the press release talks of using it in bridges? Some high strength (>1GPa) steels can be manufactured for around $1/kg. Without more concrete data these guys are touting snake oil.
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One of my favorite SciFi novels is The Excalibur Alternative which happens to be a free baen ebook... I want a sequel to that so bad.
Ender's game was pretty entertaining as well but I don't really have any desire to read the shadow series of it.... since it occurs chronologically at the same time as the rest of the stories I just feel it is rather pointless though I could be w
Sure (Score:2)
with each layer being several nanometers thick and of different composition. The final coating can be up to a centimeter thick
That's quite some layers...
Ten Times More Expensive? (Score:3)
That process, as described, sounds incredibly expensive. I suppose though, if you get the strength of titanium, this might be more economical than using the real thing for large parts. I'm sure that dealing with the waste stream is a major issue, not to mention the energy consumption.
"Up to" 10 x stronger (Score:3)
That sounds like marketing-speak to me. The "up to" part means it could be 0 x stronger, or 1.1 x stronger, and theoretically (but not likely ever in real life) up to 10 x stronger.
Nanotech? (Score:2)
I guess now we call everything "nanotech," such as what we used to call "electro-plating."
Re: Nanotech? (Score:2)
There's a difference?
Katana (Score:1)
modumetal is the developer of the process (Score:1)
http://www.modumetal.com/
maybe their site has a little more information?
Promethus meh'd. (Score:2)
Also, I'd be more impressed if they were growing nano-scale Damascus steel blades with Buckytube inclusions.
corrosion ! (Score:1)
Stronger? Don't need it. Give me stiffer! (Score:4, Interesting)
Except in specialized cases for manfacturing and mining, we have all the strength we need in buildings and bridges. What we really want is something with a higher stiffness.
Find me a material which costs the same as A992 steel and has a modulus of elasticity of 300x10^6 psi (10x that of steel) and I'll make you a millionaire. With very few exceptions, MOE scales linearly with mass, from Magnesium to Iridium. Beryllium-Aluminum is an exception, but is very brittle and hella expensive.
Yeah, get me 500ksi steel at $0.60/lb would be nice, but if it still has E=30E3ksi it won't save me much in a building. Give me 50ksi steel with E=300E3ksi and I'll save you at least 20% on the steel tonnage in a structure.
Nano -forming- ? (Score:2)
Well, it's a start. I'm waiting for the technology that allows us to 'pour' metal into 'nanoforms' - say, interlocking wire pyramids - which would allow for stronger, lighter, less-resource-consuming, and -flexible- forms.
*shrug* (Score:3)
This was invented long ago, and it's called "Rearden metal".
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This was invented long ago, and it's called "Rearden metal".
Invented? Yes (by Ayn Rand the fiction writer).
News Flash! Santa Claus and Superman don't exist either (sob)
Exists? Well, it is made from Unobtainium - the pure bullshit element. You guess.
Bainite Steel [wikipedia.org] - different technology used to create a pearlite/martensite mixture that's 7% harder.
It's not chrome (Score:1)
a process already used to make the chrome plating you might see on the engine and exhaust pipes of a motorcycle.
The exhaust pipes are nickel plated to give it the the shiny-shiny everyone likes. Chrome plating is transparent (think of it as a metallic clear coat) and is used to keep the nickel from oxidizing. Most aluminum motorcycle engines aren't plated, just highly polished. Note that I said most; no doubt some wag will jump in to claim I'm wrong and that a lot of bikes do have chromed [sic] engines.
The same is true for all that "chrome" on cars through the seventies – bump
Cracks (Score:2)
things for catastrophic failure in metal... (Score:2)
You need a pre-existing flaw for there to be a catastrophic failure in a metal. One of the reasons modern steel is so much stronger than steel made 100's of years ago (in general) is that we have learned to control the cooling of the metals to create more uniform crystal formation, and to fill interstitial defects with other elements, like carbon. We had to study metallurgy some when I was in the nuclear power program in the navy and you'll have to forgive me, I"m 30 years out from learning this stuff but
Will it be called Rearden metal? (Score:2)
I've heard of this (Score:2)
Is this layering comparable to Japanese sword maki (Score:1)
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Need more to burn more oil!! (Score:2)
Because what the world needs is to get every last drop of oil out of the ground and burn it. Global warming, what global warming?
Plausable (Score:1)
It is possible that it could make steel much stronger, by preventing microcracks from starting at the surface. Cracks start at defects in the metal or in uneven surface features like micro-scratches. If a coating can smooth and reinforce the surface, then it can stave off cracks starting and push the breaking point to much higher levels.
We already have methods of preventing defects inside the metal, and I assume they are already using those methods.
We also have used surface hardening to strengthen metals an