Metallic Glass

Finally I get to post...I'm wondering whether its my office proxy server that's causing the problem, or is it really Blogger's problem. Anyway, here's the post I typed this morning but was unable to publish.

This morning my bus was slightly late, which resulted in the bus getting very crowded. I'm mentioning this not to gripe about SBS again, but to praise the bus driver. He's one of the few bus drivers who bother to wish people "Good Morning" when you get on the bus. However, what made me notice him even more was the fact that he actually stopped the bus, opened the door, stood up and said, "I'm sorry, the bus is too crowded. Please wait for the next bus." to a potential passenger who wanted to board the bus at a further bus stop. So kudos to the bus driver of bus number 145, which stopped at Redhill MRT station at around 8:03AM.

For those of you who remember the movie "Terminator 2", you'd probably rememeber the T2000 (the evil robot), that was made up of liquid metal. Well, scientists have started to develop a smiliar material which they call metallic glass. So what's so special about this "new" metal? Its three times stronger than the best industrial steel and 10 times springier, the only problem - its brittle.

If you still remember your secondary school chemistry, you'd remember that metals have their molecules locked in a orderly manner, like a cystal. Glass on the other hand does not have this orderly internal "formation" of molecules, rather it has a liquid like arrangement, where all the molecules lie in a random order. Which is also why some people term glass as a super-cooled liquid. So, if you haven't guessed it already, metallic glass is a metal molecules made to "harden" in a glass like arrangement.

This metallic glass was initailly made by pouring molten metal onto a cold, rapidly rotating copper cylinder, making sheets of "superfrozen" amorphous metal. However, this allowed for the production of sheets only a few nanometres thick. Current techniques require the mixing of other materials with large molecules into the metal. These large molecules dramatically slow down the crystalisation process in the metal, thus allowing the creation of sheets of metallic glass alloy that are thicker.

Well, the future of this metallic glass seems bright, with many organisations like medical equipment makers, the US Defence Department and Samsung expressing interest. So, in the near future, we might be surrounded by "terminator" metal products.

IN THE movie Terminator 2, the villain is a robot made of liquid metal. He morphs from human form to helicopter and back again with ease, moulds himself into any shape without breaking, and can even flow under doorways.

Now a similar-sounding futuristic material is about to turn up everywhere. It is called metallic glass. In the past year, researchers have made metallic glass three times stronger than the best industrial steel and 10 times springier. Almost a match for the Terminator, in other words.

Metallic glass sounds like an oxymoron, and in a way it is. It describes a metal alloy with a chaotic structure. While metal atoms normally arrange themselves in ordered arrays, or crystals, the atoms in a metallic glass are a disordered jumble, rather like the atoms in a liquid or a glass. And although strictly speaking a metallic glass isn't a liquid, because the atoms are fixed in place, one company is already marketing the stuff as "liquid metal".

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