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."

Interesting uses

[toygeek]

Its light, its strong, and returns to shape. I could see how car suspensions could be made infinitely lighter with such a metal. Imagine, not needing springs anymore, the suspension links ARE the springs ;)

Things like this are what will make electric cars and extremely effecient cars possible, I think.

Stretching, but what about bending?

[wowbagger]

Stretching is interesting, but I wonder about this material's stiffness and bending forces - if you could make better springs, you could make:

• Better bows (hey, I'm into archery)
• Better shock absorbers
• Better wind-up devices (third world radios, for example)

And that's just a couple of things off the top of my head.

Re:Interesting uses

[zero_offset]

Imagine, not needing springs anymore, the suspension links ARE the springs

You'll always want springs, they're too useful to get rid of. And as you note, if you made other parts of the suspension do double-duty as springs, well, you still have springs.

The important question isn't to speculate whether you can get rid of springs, it's to speculate whether you can make better springs, either by making them more efficient, or equally efficient with a weight or cost savings. Unfortunately the site is already slashdotted, so I don't know if the article mentions those kind of details, but if it doesn't, it's a huge assumption you're making. Many materials can return to a reasonable facsimilie of their original shape after deformation, but to do so repeatedly over time in a highly predictable and consistent fashion at rates in ranges suited to a suspension system... well, it's almost impossible to beat a plain old cheap steel coils. Even high-end SAE 9254 hot-formed steel racing-grade springs are only a couple hundred bucks for a set of four...

This reminds me of the predictions (I know you're not predicting) that eventually we'd all be driving around in Nitinol ("memory metal") [dsl-online.de] cars that after a fender bender could be popped back into shape with a blow dryer...

patents

[tid242]

Are there any reasons why this metal wouldn't be a good choice for other applications?

One word: Patents.

Actually it's difficult to say what Toyota will do to make licensing difficult for 3rd parties. While they obviously have a vested interest in making competetors pay for it (if use it at all), probably much less so in keeping Girard Perregaux from using it in their chrongraphs, or Volkl building better skis with it. Point in fact, Toyota is the only company in the world with the infrastructure to scale-up their hybrid engines (actually the only company with a hybrid program of any commercial merit apart from Honda), yet they are talking about licensing the technology to their competetors (like GM), apparently in a manner fairly affordable...

Have faith in the Nippon-jin :)

-tid242

Re:Interesting uses

[sigep_ohio]

that is exactly what i was thinking. what kind of fatigue properties does this have. cars(and most other machines) don't just get loaded once and thats it. They get loaded again and again. often cyclically. Things can have great static properties, but their fatigue strength needs to be there also to be useful.

Re:Stretching, but what about bending?

[Smidge204]

Bending is a form of stretching. Think if it as the outside edge is getting longer and the inside edge is getting shorter, and somewhere in the middle the length stays the same. (That's exactly what's happening)

=Smidge=