New Titanium Alloy Bends the Rules

BinaryForces writes "According to Yahoo Takashi Saito and his colleagues at the Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories in Japan have developed a super alloy with unheard of strength and flexibility. It's not only light, but it can be stretched to more than 2.5 times its original length and return to its previous size. Heat causes almost no expansion. It can be bent and straightened repeatedly without becoming brittle. And the cool part is it was developed using high power computation instead of the traditional trial and error method. More details at Nature's website."

Re:Other applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there are limits. Metals that are "super strong" are usually flexible. This makes for a nice spring, but no good for something that needs stiffness. The springs of a car (made mention by a previous post) are a good candidate but not the chassis. A fexible chassis would throw alignment out.

This same tradeoff is frequently debated in the biking world. Aluminium frames are light and very stiff, allowing power to be efficiently transfered. Titanium frames are even lighter, but flexy, giving a smoother ride but inefficient power transfer (some power is robbed to flex the metal).