Amorphous steel

Amorphous ("glassy") steel has been around since the late '70s, but only in ribbon and powder form. There is a university research lab in the West somewhere, maybe in Utah or one of its adjoining states, that has been working on making it en masse, by fine-tuning tertiary alloys. I wrote an article about them maybe two years ago.

Maybe they've succeeded. If so, it should show up with a Google search.

Ed Huntress

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Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs

Google glassy metals and Science News. The magazine had a good article about these types of metals and the latest alloys a couple weeks ago. ERS

I know it's been used for years in specialty magnetic cores (transformers, etc.). Haven't seen any use structurally. Also remember it has to be sprayed onto a liquid nitrogen-cooled disk to cool it fast enough. Ed?

Tim

That's the way it was for a couple of decades, but, as I mentioned in another message, there was at least one university lab that two years ago said it was very close to making amorphous metal alloys in the mass, by controlling three-component alloys with extreme precision, both in the alloy components and in the cooling.

I didn't follow the links that have been posted here since, but it sounds like somebody must have achieved it, or something else that produces a similar result.

BTW, be aware that amorphous-metal powders have been around for decades, too, and that they're used in making some high-performance powder-metal (PM) parts. They lose some of their properties when they're sintered but they still exhibit better combinations of properties than parts made from conventional powders.

Ed Huntress

Doh. Stupid Google...

Nice.

Yep, nanocrystalline as I recall. At least I don't recall them still being amorphous, but "close".

Tim

There is an article on this in the Nov.6, 2004 issue of Science News. One thing it mentions is some software developed by Michael Widom and his colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University which lets you predict whether a particular mix will form a crystal structure or avoid doing so. In particular, it let's you predict that additing yttrium atoms helps you avoid making a certain crystalline structure with a repeating pattern of 23 iron atoms and 6 atoms of either carbon or boron.

It seems to me that when they tell the computer what calculations to do, they have to tell it the exact truth about what they mean, instead of heuristic explanations that help create in a given listener the carefully crafted illusion that they understand roughly what it is all about. So, one thing to do is to somehow obtain the software and its source code and see what they are actually computing. There might even by comments in the source code that provide helpful hints.

The article in Science News also mentions an article by Widom et al in the Oct.1 Physical Review B. It might have more information about the software and where it might be obtained. Actually, a google search led me to Widom's publication list, with lots of reprints: