Ryan Greene: Materials

New Alloy Stronger Than Fe And Ti [Slashdot]

Use this to cast knives for military and police officers, EMTs, and civilians. Incredibly sharp, and with a long lasting blade. Low heat tolerance (~750 deg F) keeps this out of the range of firefighters.

Since the material can be cast like a plastic, use it as a replacement for plastic where durability will outweigh the cost of replacing the part over the lifetime of the item it is used in.

Cost is the other issue, this is not cheap at $10-15 USD/lb.

UPDATE: Liquid Metal home page.

testing

Why New Cell Jammer Won't Fly. Japanese scientists recently created building material that blocks cell phones from working. Would it ever be implemented in the United States? By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]

Follow up to yesterday's story. At issue is the fact that doctors, police, firefighters, and other emergency personell need to be in touch via wireless. While the wood does not jam the signal actively, it does block it, which makes it a decision of the courts as to it's legality. (note to self, have coffee, then post)

Smart insulation

"Gah". Thought for the day: Nanotube (or larger) system that forms capilaries on the outside of a building.

How it works:

As the capilary heats up, it expands, the increase in diameter drawing water up into itself from a ground tank. This water is cooler, which helps shrink said capilary, and the water drops down into the tank as a result. There is a return feed at the top of the capilary system as well, so that water is the automatically returned once it has reached it's maximim temperature. All the capilaries feed one way only, so that when the constrict, the water goes out a side vent and returns to the tank.Since the tunes are flexible, freezing should not be an issue.

Since a cell can only return water if it's compromised, it becomes easy to notice problem areas.

Application: passive cooling system for the sunny side of a house in summer, to help keep the structure itself cool.

Problems:

How does paint adhere to a constantly expanding and contracting structure?
How do you attach it to a building without compromising the system?
What happens if the water becomes an anaerobic germ farm?
Durability: What happens when a large object strikes the surface?
How is leaking handled?

Possible solutions:

Material is grown in an overlapping series of fractals, and is set in place in sheets that automatically self align and repair (nano machines?) on installation. Applying a slight charge to system reactivates the bots and gets them to repair leaks. Solar cells (or house current) attached to the fabric then jolt them to life from time to time for periodic maintenence.

Material is applied beneath other siding materials (under aluminum, over foam board), and given it's small size the expanding/shrinkage is dealt with by having small spacers to offset the actual siding from the tubing.

How did I miss this? a material that is 12x stronger than steel, assembled in a matrix of traingles and pyramids. It's a carbon fiber.fiberglass composite. Given that it's a composite, I imagine that it will have better vibration handling abilities, so for vehicles there would be less chance of failure due to ongoing usage.

Combine this with flyweight (flyash) concrete, and you have a lightweight structure that is better suited for handling heavy loads, as well as long term stress on structures and lasting durability.

Bacteria signpost gold deposits. Gold prospectors could use changes in soil bugs to uncover new reserves of the precious metal [New Scientist]

Given that there are life forms that can live on petrochemicals, why shouldn't there be baccili that are indicators of gold in an area? I wonder if the same holds true for the prospecting of other minerals.

If we can determine the likelyhood of finding diamonds by the makeup of the geology of a region (coal seam near an formerly active volcano, so you have a high pressure/temperature field in which to "grow" the diamonds) couldn't we apply the same criteria to finding gold? Likewise, what baccili serve as flags for diamonds? Time will tell.

New Scientist. Inkjet printers for "spray on" displays. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Being able to spray on circuits is a very cool use of tech. Spary on nonconductive layers between your circuits and you can have some pretty dense cusctom circuitry in a small space. One of the problems is that the metal that is used has to be sprayed on hot, which precludes using plastic as a substrate. However, if the inkjet heads were filled with carbon nanotubes [2], they could be sprayed on cool and have conductivity similar to copper. This assumes that you can somehow line up the nanotubes as you spray them on.

For the home hobbyist, this could also lead to some serious effects for the garage shop, if tied in with my previous ideas on home manufacturing.