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Easy-to-Make Material Scratches Diamond
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Apr 21, 2007 09:20 AM
from the mohs-hardness-scale-so-hosed dept.
from the mohs-hardness-scale-so-hosed dept.
holy_calamity writes "A material tough enough to scratch diamond that can be made without resorting to massive pressure has been developed at UCLA. A regular furnace and a zap of current is enough to meld boron with the metal rhenium." Sound familiar? This is the other new material tougher than diamond, but no word yet on how they rate against each other.
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Adamantium (Score:2, Funny)
Now how is the skeletal bonding programing doing?
Stiffer, not harder (Score:5, Informative)
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rhenium diboride? (Score:4, Funny)
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Price (Score:3, Insightful)
This costs about 5x abrasive-grade diamond (Score:5, Informative)
So making ReB2 using source materials bought in small quantities on ebay would be about ten pounds (about twenty dollars) a gram; probably the cost of the electricity to run the furnace would be more than that, and the depreciation on the furnace more still.
I paid ten Euros (about fifteen dollars) for the diamond sample I have, which is two milligrams, and various diamond-industry sites give prices on the order of a hundred thousand dollars per gram; of course, rather like microchips, diamond pricing is exponential in the size because you have to find one big diamond rather than gluing two small ones together.
But ReB2 will be competing with diamond abrasive, and http://www.diamondtech.com/products/categories/di
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/re/re.
The not-so-trustworthy-looking http://biotsavart.tripod.com/bmt.htm [tripod.com] has boron at about $5000 per kilogram, so $2200 per pound; still these are orders of magnitude cheaper than diamond.
Re:Price (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost anything useful costs more than diamond. Of the materials used in industry today, diamond falls firmly into the "common and cheap" section. Subject anything with carbon in it to the temperatures and pressures common in geology, and you end up with diamond in it somewhere.
Those prices you see in jewellers? They are on the order of a thousand times larger than the actual value of diamond. Some of that pays for the expertise to cut diamonds into decorative shapes (which isn't easy), most of it is just an insanely huge markup.
We don't have a need for cheaper alternatives to diamond - it would be like searching for a cheaper alternative to sea water. Most likely the whole diamond angle is just a bogus press spin on the story.
Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
Sweet.
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
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Mmm... diamond mush...
IMPOSSIBLE! (Score:4, Funny)
Due to extensive research done by the Fourchon University of Science, diamond has been confirmed as the the hardest metal known the man. The research is as follows.
Pocket-protected scientists built a wall of iron and crashed a diamond car into it at 400 miles per hour, and the car was unharmed.
They then built a wall out of diamond and crashed a car made of iron moving at 400 miles an out into the wall, and the wall came out fine.
They then crashed a diamond car made of 400 miles per hour into a wall, and there were no survivors.
They crashed 400 miles per hour into a diamond traveling at iron car. Western New York was powerless for hours.
They rammed a wall of metal into a 400 mile per hour made of diamond, and the resulting explosion shifted the earth's orbit 400 million miles away from the sun, saving the earth from a meteor the size of a small Washington suburb that was hurtling towards midwestern Prussia at 400 billion miles per hour.
They shot a diamond made of iron at a car moving at 400 walls per hour, and as a result caused two wayward airplanes to lose track of their bearings, and make a fatal crash with two buildings in downtown New York.
They spun 400 miles at diamond into iron per wall. The results were inconclusive.
Finally, they placed 400 diamonds per hour in front of a car made of wall traveling at miles, and the result proved without a doubt that diamonds were the hardest metal of all time, if not just the hardest metal known the man.
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Wedding ring replacement (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wedding ring replacement (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wedding ring replacement (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, scratch that!
If this sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
A regular furnace and a zap of current is enough to meld boron with the metal rhenium....Sound familiar?
If this sounds familiar you need to get out more. Seriously.
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Re:If this sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
When keying someone's car isn't enough (Score:5, Funny)
Move over DeBeers (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Move over DeBeers (Score:5, Funny)
You laugh, but as a female geek I would be Seriously Impressed by a marriage proposal which featured a ring made from something exotic like that. Assuming that I was sufficiently insane to consent to marriage, I would forever after wear that ring and smirk at the Normals with their plain old diamonds.
Aaaargh, "tough" again (Score:2)
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Hardness, stiffness, and toughness (Score:5, Funny)
Again, we mustn't conflate hardness, stiffness, and toughness!
I've been studying diamond for a while now, and have a fairly prominent webpage about diamond's material properties [sque.co.uk], and on three separate occasions I have been contacted in the following way:
A budding fantasy author is writing a book in which the protagonist has a sword made out of diamond, "because diamond is the hardest material of all!", and they wanted to run the idea past me first.
So I point out that, despite being very hard (i.e. resistant to indentation), diamond is in fact very brittle (i.e. not very tough), and indeed the very first time that our hero hits something with his diamond sword, it will shatter.
In one case, the author said that I had basically ruined his life by wrecking the whole concept of the book that he had been writing for the last few years. In subsequent emails, he was begging me to come up with a solution (e.g. diamond sword, coated with steel, etc.?)...
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He's a fantasy writer, I'm not. It's fantasy. White gold has magical properties. Make the sword out of white gold and shut the fuck up.
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I'd suggest the hero having a big bag of diamonds, for the purchase of a real sword :o)
On the other hand, I'd just suggest he leaves in the sword, and call it diamantite or something. Completely like diamond, except flexible ;)
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Steel sword coated with diamond? Isn't this how samurai swords are essentially made, with a softer steel on the inside and hard martensite on the outside for a sharp edge but flexible sword?
Re:Hardness, stiffness, and toughness (Score:5, Funny)
The sword was crafted by an Uber Death Mage, who used the blood of the last virgin to scream "first post!" on slashdot to cast a technobabble spell, which caused the entire blade to form as a single facet of diamond. Thus having no stress points, the blade would be nearly perfect, as long as the victim didn't use a Google shield to find previous postings and block it.
That took me a whole 15 seconds.... surely he's had a bit more time to ponder?
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what? (Score:5, Funny)
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What the?! How did I suddenly get teleported into Barrens chat?
Mohs would be proud. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
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Badly. Bullets should be (a) heavy, and (b) tear apart easily. That way they (a) contain lots of kinetic energy, and (b) rips the target to pieces.
Military ammo usual
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Informative)
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
First: there is no infantry weapons system (other than the "NLW" which are designed for crowd control, not combat) specifically intended to cripple rather than kill an enemy. One shot, one kill, is always the infantryman's goal. The best possible way to remove an enemy soldier from the fight is to kill him; wounded enemies often can and do keep shooting back. The "wounding is better than killing" meme is often repeated among soldiers as well as civilians, but it does not appear anywhere in Army doctrine.
Second: the LOAC's prohibition on "dum-dum" rounds is basically intended to make things easier on military surgeons; it's a matter of what's humane off the battlefield, not on it.
Third: FMJ rounds, as opposed to the wide variety of other types of rounds which would be acceptable under the LOAC, are used primarily for reliability and versatility. Reliability, because rounds with any exposed lead will foul a rifle under typical infantry combat conditions (dirt, mud, sand, and enormous volume of fire between cleanings.) Versatility, because softer rounds are better for use against unarmored human targets, but that's about it. Trying to stop a vehicle with soft-nose rounds? Good luck. And modern body armor is very very good, but you've still got a good chance of getting through it with a dead-on shot from a rifle of decent caliber if you're using FMJ; soft-nose will just go splat.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Interesting)
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
So do I. There are still other reasons it's dumb.
First, the argument goes, as stated by the parent poster, that "and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting." Except they won't. Troops aren't trained to put down their guns and stop fighting back to rescue wounded. The other argument goes that it ties up the other guy's resources in getting him to a hospital, fixing him, caring for him, and so forth. But that only matters if *you* lose the battle. If you *win*, you're now in possession of all those wounded, and now *you* have to care for them. Then there's the fact that there are all sorts of wounds that allow the wounded to not only keep fighting, but to return to the front to fight again after some medical care.
It's a dumb myth.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
We tried to kill the myth, sergeant, but apparently our bullets could only cripple it.
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No matter how much (a) it has, if it is hard enough, it will strip the rifling grooves right out of the bar
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clobbering (Score:4, Funny)
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So Diamond is a metal? I guess it is a chain in some cases. Then in answer to your comment, it depends - is it in or out of a marriage?