DocM Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2015/02/04/new_steel_outperforms_titanium_109058.html New Steel Alloy as Strong as Titanium If human society had a backbone, it would probably be composed of steel. Alloys of iron and carbon, steels are manufactured to the tune of 1.3 billion tons annually, and put to work in buildings, tools, automobiles, machines, and weapons, among many other places. The reasons for steel's success are simple: it is cheap, strong, relatively easy to mass-produce, and generally ductile, meaning that it can be stretched and bent without fracturing. But steel's dominance has been slightly waning of late. For example, the proportion of steel and iron in an average light vehicle decreased from 68.1% in 1995 to 60.1% in 2011. Materials with higher ratios of strength to weight are increasingly being used instead. Today, a team of researchers reporting in Nature has provided a recipe that could return steel to its top form. Sang-Heon Kim, Hansoo Kim, and Nack J. Kim, based out of South Korea's Graduate Institute of Ferrous Technology, describe a new alloy of steel bolstered with aluminum and augmented with nickel that matches or outperforms titanium alloys on measures of strength and ductility. The formula is key, but the process is just as important. The authors described their methods in detail and noted that they're readily "compatible with existing commercial processes of the steel industry." The steel under investigation here was produced using an induction melting furnace. About 40 kg was melted in a protective argon atmosphere and cast to a rectangular ingot. After homogenization treatment at 1,150 C for 2 h, the ingot was hot-rolled with a starting temperature of 1,050 C to hot strips 3 mm in thickness. Then, the hot-rolled strips were cold-rolled to final sheets 1 mm in thickness. The cold-rolled sheets were annealed at 870 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkolm Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 Very interesting. I'll take a custom knife made from this steel please. +E.Worm Jimmy 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DocM Posted February 4, 2015 Author Share Posted February 4, 2015 Ka-Bar, katana, wakizashi, kukri....and a nice assisted folder, please. perochan and Stokkolm 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unobscured Vision Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 It will take them a while to perfect the process where it can done on a mass-production scale, but when they do it'll be a game-changer. I'm interested in density and weight versus titanium, but to be honest I think Carbon and Graphite is the way go. Much lighter, far stronger, and Carbon is far more abundant ... well, everywhere. We just need to perfect the Carbon-based Science, Industries and Manufacturing sectors. Metals are useful, of course -- but there's only so much of those. We can get Carbon from pretty much everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrack Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 The penta-graphene seems very interesting too, if they can make it. http://phys.org/news/2015-02-penta-graphene-variant-carbon.html It will take them a while to perfect the process where it can done on a mass-production scale, but when they do it'll be a game-changer. I'm interested in density and weight versus titanium, but to be honest I think Carbon and Graphite is the way go. Much lighter, far stronger, and Carbon is far more abundant ... well, everywhere. We just need to perfect the Carbon-based Science, Industries and Manufacturing sectors. Metals are useful, of course -- but there's only so much of those. We can get Carbon from pretty much everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unobscured Vision Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 The penta-graphene seems very interesting too, if they can make it. http://phys.org/news/2015-02-penta-graphene-variant-carbon.html Yep, and it's apparently superconductive. Lots of potential uses for it, if they can actually make some. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrack Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 Yep, and it's apparently superconductive. Lots of potential uses for it, if they can actually make some. Yeah I think that the next couple of decades will determine how we stand in terms of the advancement of physics, chemistry and biology and hopefully even better at nano-scale. Unobscured Vision 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unobscured Vision Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 As long as politics and ideology don't get in the way. Discoveries tend to be turned towards Defense projects because those more often generate the monies needed to further the research. "Trickle-Down Science" is the term, I think, because a lot of secondary discoveries (and therefore, uses of those discoveries) filter downward from those programs. T3X4S 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrack Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 As long as politics and ideology don't get in the way. Discoveries tend to be turned towards Defense projects because those more often generate the monies needed to further the research. "Trickle-Down Science" is the term, I think, because a lot of secondary discoveries (and therefore, uses of those discoveries) filter downward from those programs. Yeah if not for the political and religious reasons, we would be a race quite forward. I think in my dream future, Fusion and Snow Cold Temperature (Better if at room temperature) Superconductivity will kick ass. Wouldn't mind some anti-gravity technology but that is too far-fetched at the moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T3X4S Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 yeah but how does it compare to adamantium ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shiranui Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 I wonder what it must be like living in a country where one fifth of the population has the surname Kim. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XerXis Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 It will take them a while to perfect the process where it can done on a mass-production scale, but when they do it'll be a game-changer. I'm interested in density and weight versus titanium, but to be honest I think Carbon and Graphite is the way go. Much lighter, far stronger, and Carbon is far more abundant ... well, everywhere. We just need to perfect the Carbon-based Science, Industries and Manufacturing sectors. Metals are useful, of course -- but there's only so much of those. We can get Carbon from pretty much everything. far more brittle though, so it all depends on what qualities you need Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unobscured Vision Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 far more brittle though, so it all depends on what qualities you need True, but that can be dealt with in the Engineering and Construction processes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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