DOE Develops New Flexible Glass Stronger than Any Known Material

January 12th, 2011 by Susan Kraemer

A glass that is stronger and tougher than steel has been developed in the lab in a collaboration between the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology (Cal-Tech), funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science.

This glass can bend, if subjected to stress, rather than shatter. The new kind of strong glass material is a microalloy with palladium, a metal with a high “bulk-to-shear” stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials.

The initial samples of the new metallic glass were microalloys of palladium with phosphorous, silicon and germanium that yielded glass rods approximately one millimeter in diameter. Adding a fifth metal, silver, to the mix enabled the Cal Tech researchers to expand the thickness of the glass 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,” says Robert Richie, the lead author of “A Damage-Tolerant Glass” just published the research in the journal Nature Materials.

Ritchie holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Materials Science and Engineering Department.

Co-authors were Cal-Tech’s William Johnson; one of the pioneers in the field of metallic glass fabrication, and Marios Demetriou, who actually made the new glass with funding from the National Science Foundation, and Maximilien Launey, Glenn Garrett, Joseph Schramm and Douglas Hofmann who joined Ritchie and Johnson in characterization and testing at UC Berkeley, funded by the DOE.

In earlier version, the Berkeley-Cal Tech collaboration stopped microscopic cracks from becoming “shattered” glass fragments, by building micro-structural barriers with the metals.

In this new phase, the group takes it a step further. By making the glass able to bend, it can’t even develop a crack to lead it to eventually shatter.

In the process, they have created a new kind of a glass that is stronger and tougher than any material known.

Potentially, a solar roof protected within a glass that’s stronger than steel would need a great deal less roofing infrastructure to hold it up, reducing both solar (and roofing) prices. The research was funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Source: Eureka Alert
Image: Syed Abulhasan Rizvi

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

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About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

Ian

Interesting, and the theory seems plausible, but what does it cost to manufacture this glass? Is it cheap enough to truly offset your cost of infrastructure and solar?
stratocruiser

First thing I wonder about is how much Palladium there is, and where, and who controls it.
Anon

Folks, this is a *metallic* glass. All that refers to is the crystal structure of the metal (as in, there isn’t one). Metallic glasses have lots of interesting mechanical properties, but they are *not* transparent.
- http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com Phoenix Woman
  
  It’ll still make a fabulous substrate. We already have translucent asphalt called Floraphalte; put that on top of a glassy-metal set of layers and suddenly you have solar cells you can drive on.
  - Anon
    
    What would be the point of using it as a substrate? The only benefit I see from this article is improved mechanical properties. Solar panels have paltry mechanical requirements, and steel is already as strong as steel and guaranteed a million times cheaper than this.
    
    A strong transparent top layer for solar roads is an interesting problem, but this development is in a completely different ball park.
http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com Phoenix Woman

Suddenly the Solar Roadways project is very feasible indeed:

http://www.solarroadways.com
- http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
  
  Oh, brilliant. Right.
  - hamza
    
    is it available in market, and what name have they given to it?