New glue for metals

This was discussed over in SED. OT? Welding, Soldering May Be Obsolete Two of the materials are a lot more expensive than tin or lead.

Dan

I've run into Indium before for soldering glass and wanted to have a go but when I looked into it in small quantities the stuff seemed to be about the same price as gold so was a non starter for what was potentially a bit of fun.

There have been a lot of developments in adhesive assembly, but don't think that welding is becoming obsolete. Laser welding is really taking off, for example, along with friction-stir welding and all kinds of robotic welding systems. Of our three magazines, Welding Productivity is the one that's growing the fastest.

That's a metal I've never encountered. This process sounds like contact cement for metal, with 1,500 psi joints. It could be an efficient production process. Assembled cure time is a major limiting factor for adhesive assembly for metals.

It sounds like a typical university lab press release -- get some cool- looking results in well-controlled laboratory conditions, use that to get magazine coverage, use that to get money for your startup...

And then fade away as it turns out to not actually work in the real world.

Keep your day job, Tim. d8-)

This is being touted for electronic applications, because it's conductive. But the general approach leads to very fast assembly as a possibility. That's what I thought others might find interesting.

The research paper is presented in ASM's "Advanced Materials and Processes," which is a solid industry publication. If you want to see the whole issue, I can send you a link to it in my Dropbox account -- but it's 202 MB. Brace yourself.

There's another interesting article in there about linear stir welding, which is available now in commercial equipment. This is the third steel-to-aluminum welding application that's come up in recent months. The other two are being used by car makers (VW, Audi, M-B and GM) and by NASA as we speak.

It looks to me like a metal velcro: the metal nanorods from both sides interleave when the surfaces are pressed together, and tangle up. Except of course real plastic velcro pieces don't melt together, and in the Northwestern metal process some sort of intermetallic alloy develops.