If you drop an aluminum spoon in a sink full of water, the spoon will sink to the bottom. That's because aluminum, in its conventional form, is denser than water says Utah State University chemist Alexander Boldyrev.
But if you restructure the common household metal at the molecular level, as Boldyrev and colleagues did using computational modeling, you could produce an ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum that's lighter than water. Boldyrev, along with scientists Iliya Getmanskii, Vitaliy Koval, Rusian Minyaev and Vladimir Minkin of Southern Federal University in Rostov-on Don, Russia, published findings in the Sept. 18, 2017, online edition of The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
The team's research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russian Ministry of Science and Education.
"My colleagues' approach to this challenge was very innovative," says Boldyrev, professor in USU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "They started with a known crystal lattice, in this case, a diamond, and substituted every carbon atom with an aluminum tetrahedron."
The team's calculations confirmed such a structure is a new, metastable, lightweight form of crystal aluminum. And to their amazement, it has a density of only 0.61 gram per cubic centimeter, in contrast to convention aluminum's density of 2.7 grams per cubic centimeter.
"That means the new crystallized form will float on water, which has a density of one gram per cubic centimeter," Boldyrev says.
Such a property opens a whole new realm of possible applications for the non-magnetic, corrosive-resistant, abundant, relatively inexpensive and easy-to-produce metal.
"Spaceflight, medicine, wiring and more lightweight, more fuel-efficient automotive parts are some applications that come to mind," Boldyrev says. "Of course, it's very early to speculate about how this material could be used. There are many unknowns. For one thing, we don't know anything about its strength."
Still, he says, the breakthrough discovery marks a novel way of approaching material design.
"An amazing aspect of this research is the approach: using a known structure to design a new material," Boldyrev says. "This approach paves the way for future discoveries."
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More information:
Getmanskii, Iliya V., Vitaliy V. Koval, Ruslan M. Minyaev, Alexander I. Boldyrev and Vladimir Il Minkin. "Supertetrahedral Aluminum - A New Allotropic Ultra-Light Crystalline Form of Aluminum." Journal of Physical Chemistry C. 18 September 2017. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b07565
tallenglish
not rated yet Sep 22, 2017tallenglish
1 / 5 (1) Sep 22, 2017434a
5 / 5 (6) Sep 22, 2017https://en.wikipe...ynitride
Aluminium oxynitride or AlON is a ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen. It is marketed under the name ALON by Surmet Corporation.[3] AlON is optically transparent (≥80%) in the near-ultraviolet, visible and midwave-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is 4 times harder than fused silica glass, 85% as hard as sapphire, and nearly 15% harder than magnesium aluminate spinel. Since it has a cubic spinel structure, it can be fabricated to transparent windows, plates, domes, rods, tubes and other forms using conventional ceramic powder processing techniques. ALON is the hardest polycrystalline transparent ceramic available commercially
Isotherm7
5 / 5 (2) Sep 22, 2017syndicate_51
not rated yet Sep 22, 2017No use if the stuff will simply fragment apart or fold at the slightest disturbance.
rrrander
1 / 5 (2) Sep 23, 2017TheGhostofOtto1923
not rated yet Sep 24, 2017"sapphire glass from GT Advanced Technologies is generating a lot of interest. It's much harder to scratch than Corning's market leading Gorilla Glass (which is probably on your phone right now)"
"Sapphire (Al2O3) Synthetic Sapphire is a single crystal form of corundum, Al2O3"
-as usual no research, lots of babble.
We should soon be using materials like diamond and sapphire for industry and construction applications.
grondilu
not rated yet Sep 24, 2017a_rae
not rated yet Sep 24, 2017FM79
not rated yet Sep 25, 2017Exactly. Besides it might be as brittle as chalk for all we know.
jim15936
not rated yet Sep 25, 2017Pooua
not rated yet Sep 25, 2017