"Metallic Glass" could revolutionize Aircraft Structures

[Rooster Cruiser]

Here's an interesting one for everyone.  Makes ya wonder if there might someday actually be a Transparent Airplane like what Wonder Woman used in the comics...

RC
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,370864,00.html

Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.

The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman's plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.

The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is.

It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a "jammed" state of matter — somewhere between liquid and solid — that moves very slowly.

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Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass are in something like suspended animation, unable to reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbors.

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Work so far has concentrated on trying to understand the traffic jam, but now Paddy Royall from the University of Bristol in England, with colleagues in Canberra, Australia and Tokyo, has shown that glass fails to be a solid due to the special atomic structures that form in a glass when it cools.

Icosahedron jams

Some materials crystallize as they cool, arranging their atoms into a highly regular pattern called a lattice, Royall said, but although glass "wants" to be a crystal, as it cools the atoms become jammed in a nearly random arrangement, preventing it from forming a regular lattice.

In the 1950s, Sir Charles Frank in the Physics Department at Bristol suggested that the arrangement of the "jam" should form what is known as an icosahedron, but at the time he was unable to prove it.

An icosahedron is like a 3-D pentagon, and just as you cannot tile a floor with pentagons, you cannot fill 3-D space with icosahedrons, Royall explained. That is, you can't make a lattice out of pentagons.

When it comes to glass, Frank thought, there is a competition between crystal formation and pentagons that prevents the construction of a crystal.

If you cool a liquid down and it makes a lot of pentagons and the pentagons survive, the crystal cannot form.

It turns out that Frank was right, Royall said, and his team proved this experimentally.

You can't watch what happens to atoms as they cool because they are too small, so Royall and his colleagues used special particles called colloids that mimic atoms, but are large enough to be visible using state-of-the-art microscopy.

The team cooled some down and watched what happened.

What they found was that the gel these particles formed also "wants" to be a crystal, but it fails to become one due to the formation of icosahedra-like structures — exactly as Frank had predicted.

"It is the formation of these structures that underlie jammed materials and explains why a glass is a glass and not a liquid — or a solid," Royall said.

The findings are detailed in the June 22 issue of the journal Nature Materials. The research was supported in part by a grant from Britain's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology as well as the Royal Society.

Preventing jetliner disasters

Knowing the structure formed by atoms as a glass cools represents a major breakthrough in the understanding of meta-stable materials and will allow further development of new strong yet light materials called metallic glasses, Royall said, which is already used to make some golf clubs.

This stuff is generally shiny black in color, not transparent, due to having a lot of free electrons (think of mercury in an old thermometer).

Metals normally crystallize when they cool, but stress builds up along the boundaries between crystals, which can lead to metal failure.

For example, the world's first jetliner, the British built De Havilland Comet, fell out of the sky due to metal failure.

When metals are be made to cool with the same internal structure as a glass and without crystal grain boundaries, they are less likely to fail, Royall said.

Metallic glasses could be suitable for a whole range of products beyond golf clubs that need to be flexible such as aircraft wings and engine parts, he said.

Glass is not what it seems

Royall is part of a group of scientists who think that if you wait long enough, perhaps billions of years, all glass will eventually crystallize into a true solid.

In other words, glass is not in an equilibrium state, he believes, although it appears that way to us during our limited lifetimes.

"This is not universally accepted," Royall told LiveScience. "Our work will go some way to making that point more accepted. I think there is a growing weight of evidence that certainly many glasses 'want' to be a crystal."

Still, glass "looks like a liquid and this is one of the great riddles that we have gone some way to solving," Royall said. "It has always been thought that glass has same structure as a liquid, and that's why it looks like it. It does not have same structure as liquid."

[Oddball]

i suppose it could be used in other aircraft structures like the fuselage and not just the wings  intresting that since if "Metalic Glass" can be used fatigue due to stress and strain  would be near nonexistent.

[AirScorp]

Metals normally crystallize when they cool, but stress builds up along the boundaries between crystals, which can lead to metal failure.

You guys managed to wake the engineer in me. Well, what should, I say, I find the article badly written. While stating technically correct points, it is misleading.

Glass structure is very strong but it's brittle. It's very strong because it doesn't have abnormalities and grains (so it doesn't have boundaries between the crystals which concentrate the stress) as the article says. Moreover, it is not so prone to corrosion and doesn't fatigue as much.

But for the same reason it is less elastic and it has little "give" because it won't deform plastically. And when it would fail, it would fail drastically and with no prior notice. In layman's terms, a wing made from metal glass would not deform if you happened to take too many G's, it would just break off.

Oh, and glass metal is not transparent. It would look like mercury. Cool nonetheless

So, don't plan on seeing planes made solely from metal glass. Still, there are parts in an airplane that it's properties would be beneficial and there are other materials, like ceramics that have these properties and have a place in aviation. Bad thing about metal glass is that it is still very dense. So it will be somewhat heavy to be first on list to be used in aviation.

Where I DO see metal glass being used is composite materials and think carbon fiber here. We already have metal reinforced with glass fibers, so why not metal glass fibers. Material technology is advancing and I'm sure they'll find a good use for metal glass as well. We'll just have to wait and see 

Nerd mode OFF 

[Rooster Cruiser]

You guys managed to wake the engineer in me.

Shoot Nick, I thought you were just a guitar player!  Now I'm gonna have to adjust my mental image of you.   

I'm not surprised about the quality of writing.  This is after all a journalist writing the piece.  Just look at how often journalists write up stuff about aviation that is completely erroneous.  However, they got enough of the main parts across to stoke my imagination.   

RC

[AirScorp]

Hehe R/C. No, I'm a mechanical engineer student who can't get his degree. Don't ask why, best reason I can give you is that it just wasn't for me and I should have given up and do something else right from the start. Computer science or something.
But I do have gained a part of engineer's way of thinking and learned much in the process. (Keep in mind, the educational system here is TOTALLY different).
Material science, math (I've come to hate math), mechanics and strength are some of the fields I've been taught.

For me it just means things like why the left aileron goes down on a left turn while the other one goes up, why the speed indicator has a yellow range and why the bolts will come off if you turn too hard seem natural and intuitive to me 


Now, another thread of thought, what if metal glass was invisible to radars? I don't see why it would but just think of mercury-like black fighter aircraft! I do like the idea!

[Frank N. O.]

Interesting that there are still new things to invent/make reality. It reminds me of Transparent Aluminum from Star Trek, V or VI I think, and then not long ago they said in the news they were making something like that, although it wasn't quite the same but some kind of layer to put on glass to make it more bulletproof I think it was.

Frank