Researchers working at Berkeley Lab and Caltech have designed a new type of glass that is stronger than steel. The “metallic glass” is strengthened by palladium, a substance with a high “built-to-shear” ratio. That ratio means the glass can bend rather than cracking. The group says the new substance in many ways is stronger than the world’s strongest materials.
According to Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist in charge of Berkeley’s part in the project says this project is the first of it’s kind in terms of developing metallic glass fabrication, while he says even stronger materials are expected.
Cracking in the glass is stopped by using micro-structural barriers with palladium added which helps prevent cracks from opening by creating better plasticity.
According to Electronista :
The first samples were microalloys of palladium with phosphorous, silicon and germanium, which created glass rods about one millimeter in diameter. Adding silver allowed researchers to bump up the thickness of the rods to six millimeters.
“The rule of thumb is that to make a metallic glass we need to have at least five elements so that when we quench the material, it doesn’t know what crystal structure to form and defaults to amorphous,” Ritchie said.
You can find the entire published project in an article titled “A Damage-Tolerant Glass” available in the Nature Materials journals. The article is co-authored by Robert Ritchie, Marios Demetriou, Maximilien Launey, Glenn Garrett, Joseph Schramm, Douglas Hofmann and William Johnson of Caltech.
