Explore the Strength of Metallic Glass

[Ivan Seeking]

...Metallic glass sounds like an oxymoron, and in a way it is. It describes a metal alloy with a chaotic structure. While metal atoms normally arrange themselves in ordered arrays, or crystals, the atoms in a metallic glass are a disordered jumble, rather like the atoms in a liquid or a glass. And although strictly speaking a metallic glass isn't a liquid, because the atoms are fixed in place, one company is already marketing the stuff as "liquid metal".

It is the unusual structure that makes metallic glass so promising. In crystalline metal alloys, the atoms are ordered within regions called "grains", and the boundaries between the grains are points of weakness in the material. Metallic glasses, however, have no grain boundaries, so they are much stronger. Hit a crystalline metal with a hammer and it will bend, absorbing some of the energy of the blow by giving way along grain boundaries. But the atoms in an amorphous metal are tightly packed, and easily bounce back to their original shape after a blow (see Diagram). These materials lack bulky crystalline grains, so they can be shaped into features just 10 nanometres across. And their liquid-like structure means they melt at lower temperatures, and can be moulded nearly as easily as plastics.

No wonder companies are interested.[continued]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18624931.000

 

[pack_rat2]

In the basic materials engineering class I took, the professor showed us some samples of "metallic glass" of a different sort: an alloy of glass and iron. It had been made by blowing a vapor consisting of iron & glass onto a very cold surface, where it froze so quickly that there wasn't time for the individual constituents to separate. It was transparent like glass, but with a greyish tint, and had some suface rust.