An alloy of chromium, cobalt, and nickel has just given us the highest fracture toughness ever measured in a material on Earth.
"In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminum airframe in passenger airplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it's a staggering number."
This involved cracking the material and measuring the stress required to cause the fracture to grow and then looking at the crystalline structure of the samples. Sometimes boundaries are created between unit cells that are deformed and those that aren't. These boundaries are called dislocations, and when force is applied to the metal, they move, allowing the metal to change shape. The more dislocations a metal has, the more malleable it is.Irregularities in the metal can block the dislocations from moving; this is what makes a material strong.
"As you are pulling it, the first mechanism starts, and then the second one starts, and then the third one starts, and then the fourth,""Now, a lot of people will say, well, we've seen nanotwinning in regular materials, we've seen slip in regular materials. That's true. There's nothing new about that, but it's the fact they all occur in this magical sequence that gives us these really tremendous properties.
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