Having carried out regular work with some of the most valuable metals of the Earth, scientists have obtained one of the most durable materials in the world.
Graphene may be considered the toughest material known to man, but there is a new substance that could be just as useful. A team of scientists from Sandia National Laboratories has created a new alloy that is the most wear-resistant material ever created. They were able to achieve this by combining two of the rarest materials on Earth: gold and platinum.
According to the researchers, the new Pt-Au alloy is so durable that if you make car tires from it, then they can completely circle the Earth's equator, which is 40,075 km long, before they wear out. Combinations of gold and platinum have been tested before, but the team at Sandia Laboratories has gone further than their predecessors. Using computational labs, they were able to compose material at the atomic level to ensure that its strength and resilience reached peak levels.
“We work with fundamental atomic mechanisms and microstructure, putting it all together to understand why good performance is achieved or why performance is poor in the end, and then we develop an alloy that gives good performance,” says Michael Chandross, one of the co-authors research describing the alloy.
Comparison of wear of Pt-Au and other alloys / Sandia National Laboratories.
Electronic devices like smartphones could significantly increase their lifespan by using a thin coating of this new alloy on their moving parts, which in turn would help the electronics industry save about $ 100 million a year. However, the most valuable aspect of this material was completely unexpected: during testing, the alloy began to form a black film on its surface, which turned out to be diamond-like carbon, one of the most valuable and effective artificial lubricants.
“We believe that stability and inherent wear resistance allows carbonaceous molecules from the environment to bond and break down during sliding, eventually forming a diamond-like carbon. In industry, this can be achieved in other ways, but they usually involve the use of vacuum chambers with high-temperature plasma of carbon. It can be very expensive at times,”explains John Curry, lead author of the study.
As a result, it turns out that this alloy is not only the most wear-resistant material on Earth, but it also independently creates one of the best industrial lubricants. Not bad.
Promotional video:
Vladimir Guillen
