Every time an astronaut gets off the ground, he or she owes a debt to the
Wright brothers, not just because the boys dared to fly, but because they were
smart enough to use a newfangled aluminum alloy to lighten the load of their
engine and make flight possible.
The art and science of creating new, lighter and stronger metal alloys has progressed remarkably in the intervening 100 years. But many scientists now envision a looming limit to this progress owing to a mature science that will now make only incremental gains.
Then along comes Takashi Saito, a Japanese researcher who appears to have shattered the glass ceiling on metal-alloy development limitations.
Saito, of the Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories, and his colleagues have jettisoned the traditional art approach to alloy development -- the trial and error used at Kitty Hawk and everywhere since -- and turned to pure science, specifically quantum mechanics and high-powered computer computation, to create new mixtures of metal which, one outside scientist says, have spectacular properties of strength and flexibility.
In the April 17 issue of the journal Science, Saito's team writes that their titanium-based alloys exhibit "super" properties, such as ultrahigh strength and super elasticity. The new materials could prove useful for spaceflight, where precision operations are conducted in ruthless conditions.
The alloys approach "magic" upper property limits that previous methods could not attain, the scientists say.
Alloys of myriad mixings are used in various parts on satellites, deep space probes and the shuttle fleet. The new alloys could be particularly suitable for ultralightweight springs, as one example, or other "precision instruments for use in rugged environments such as in outer space," the researchers report.
To develop an alloy, researchers add one ore more so-called solute elements to a metallic solvent, such as aluminum or titanium, explains Gary Shiflet, who wrote an analysis of the new results for the journal. But there is a practically infinite number of possible atomic combinations that, in the end, result in wildly differing structural properties.
Saito's group has made "major advances in specific material properties that would be exceedingly difficult to achieve by trial and error," says Shiflet, who works in materials science and engineering at the University of Virginia.
The result, Shiflet says, is an alloy with "spectacular properties" and the promise of materials that "may have the strength to carry a load and be able to perform another distinctive capacity, such as sensing damage and perhaps even repairing themselves."
Shiflet said the discovery, and the computer work that drove it, are incentives for other researchers to concoct new metal mixtures.
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