What exactly is patented here? My guess would be that you cannot actually patent a material, but that you can patent a process for manufacturing a material. That's the way it seems to me things should work. Does anyone know if that's the case?
Reminds me of Rearden metal. With metal that unique, maybe they'll come up with some radical designs/products. Kinetic charger for touchscreen devices? Fold-up iPad?
I think it's great CalTech has done so much work on such a marketable, revolutionary product. With all the money that flows to universities for research, I hope for more this. Looking through the patents for liquid metal, they are assigned to liquid metal technologies and not the university, but perhaps caltech has some equity (doubt it though).
Perhaps it might make a good ruggedization material? Apple appears to be highly interested in materials that would make a portable product have a very long life in your pocket (gorilla glass).
They say in the video that it's a "metallic glass." I wonder if they figured out a way to make it transparent, or maybe it can be used to turn the entire surface of the device into a capacitive touch interface, on top of being insanely strong and elastic.
I wonder if they (LiquidMetal) made any baseball bats in addition to their golf clubs...
The "metallic glass" name has nothing to do with transparency; the reason it gets this name is that its atomic structure is identical to that of a glass. The atoms in glass, liquidmetal and for that matter liquids, are not arranged in a regular ordering like most solids are. They have an amorpheous structure, where the atoms are "frozen" in a random network.
My cousin worked for LiquidMetal a number of years back (7-10 or so) when their primary market was golf clubs. Even back then it was well known within the company that the long-term plan was mobile devices. They even had a few prototypes made in China to help with pitches.
LiquidMetal is substantially stronger than other metals. It's not about the bouncing. It is perfect for saving weight and especially thickness. At the time the only issue was cost, but I assume they have covered good ground on that front over the last decade.
As for the technology itself, my understanding is that they cool the alloy in a particular way that leaves its molecules unaligned -- like a liquid. This makes it much stronger.
Isn't it obvious? An amorphous material can more easily be die-cast (like injection molded) so that metal parts can be produced into final shape with ease and precision.
This means that, when everyone else has caught up to their machining / laser manufacturing, they'll suddenly have this magic ability to create strong materials is very unique shapes with very high economies of scale.
I hope you are right... suddenly it doesn't seem that many other consumer electronic companies are interested in material science. Are Dell, HP, Motorola, Lenovo, etc... trying to catch up with laser manufacturing?
Apple acquired a real gem. I hope they don't just sit on the IP for their own use, this material can make many other great products.
Liquidmetal alloys achieved yield strength of over 1723 MPa, nearly twice the strength of conventional crystalline titanium alloys.
That's some material science porn, liquid metal products can use a fraction the amount of material to achieve the same strength as other metals. This will be great for bikes, electric cars, knives, all types of springs, spaceships, hammers, more efficient engines, those desktop swinging balls... Breakthroughs like this don't happen often.
Amorphous, highly elastic materials (glass comes to mind) are often not great for long-wearing designs like bicycles. At least to present, amorphous metals wear more like glass or carbon fibre than steel: invisible structural damage leads to quick catastrophic failure. Rather than dings you get severed seat tubes and exploding wheels. For the time being, no one's invented anything better than cro-moly steel for the good old bicycle.
It does sound like an utterly fascinating material, however. The slow, glass-like viscosity curve would be an amazing property to play with.
According to the article, Apple got exclusive rights to electronics usage only, so while Apple may be doing harm to hamper new electronics usage of it, most of the stuff you mentioned should still be open to be licensed by other companies.
I used to have a Sandisk Sansa e270, which was supposed to have a LiquidMetal backplate. I wasn't impressed; to me, it appeared to be just another dull grey metal alloy. But then, I'm not a metallurgist.
Was researching whether LM could be applied to bicycle frames - probably not, as per this Slashdot post:
This isn't going to replace structural metals any time soon. How do I know? I did dynamic planar compressive strain experiments and ABAQUS on this stuff and composites with this as the matrix for my senior thesis.
Being a metallic glass, it has all sorts of crazy properites, as mentioned in the articles, but when it reaches the yeild strength it shatters (at least in non-composite form).
Also, because it is a metallic glass, it is inherently a meta-stable solid.... metals usually have relatively simple crystal structures, and thusly crystalize quickly with relatively small undercooling. The clever trick with this stuff is that it's a mix of four or five metallic elements that have a large span of atomic radii (this stuff is Zr-Ni-Cu-Ti-Be, various weightings of each, usually the Ni=Cu=Ti). Anyhow, when it finally does crystallize, whether due to heat, fatigue or constant strain, it forms a pretty complex crystal structure (I don't recall which one offhand) that allows very little motion of dislocations. Thus, it's super brittle when in it's thermodynamically stable state. Moreover, even with this clever alloying, it still requires high cooling rates to avoid crystallization from the melt, and is thusly hard to cast into large ingots.
Thus, whether it takes too hard an impact (can never be a tooling metal or knife, in pure form) or is under strain for too long (can never ever be a structural metal - too flaw sensitive in pure form and too expensive to process and machine in composite form) it will fail catastrophically.
Basically, this means it's pretty useless for most applications metals are required for (due to lack of crystal structure it's also a poor heat conductor - sorry overclockers). And because it is opaque, it can't be used for traditional glass applications. Liquid Metal has been around for a while trying to push the golf clubs, for at least three years, more like four or five, so I'm not sure what the sudden attention is for. We ran a back of the evelope calculation in my research group: Say you're on the links, and you mis-strike the ball, and hit a large rock in the ground with a non-composite liquidmetal club... basically you'll shatter the face of the head (only the face is amorphous due to process/cost/strength issues), sending shrapnel flying into your ankle. Yum.
Still, from a physics perspective, this stuff is really interesting due to its completely artificial nature (you'll never find anything close to this in nature) and odd mechanical properties (it's the metallic version of flubber). Commericially, in bulk form, I'd say they should shy away from structural applications and perhaps try transformers, where the thin film versions of amorphous metals have significant gains over silicon.
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 86.6 ms ] threadIt is indeed a method patent.
I wonder if they (LiquidMetal) made any baseball bats in addition to their golf clubs...
LiquidMetal is substantially stronger than other metals. It's not about the bouncing. It is perfect for saving weight and especially thickness. At the time the only issue was cost, but I assume they have covered good ground on that front over the last decade.
As for the technology itself, my understanding is that they cool the alloy in a particular way that leaves its molecules unaligned -- like a liquid. This makes it much stronger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal
This means that, when everyone else has caught up to their machining / laser manufacturing, they'll suddenly have this magic ability to create strong materials is very unique shapes with very high economies of scale.
At least that's my take...
Liquidmetal alloys achieved yield strength of over 1723 MPa, nearly twice the strength of conventional crystalline titanium alloys.
That's some material science porn, liquid metal products can use a fraction the amount of material to achieve the same strength as other metals. This will be great for bikes, electric cars, knives, all types of springs, spaceships, hammers, more efficient engines, those desktop swinging balls... Breakthroughs like this don't happen often.
It does sound like an utterly fascinating material, however. The slow, glass-like viscosity curve would be an amazing property to play with.
This isn't going to replace structural metals any time soon. How do I know? I did dynamic planar compressive strain experiments and ABAQUS on this stuff and composites with this as the matrix for my senior thesis.
Being a metallic glass, it has all sorts of crazy properites, as mentioned in the articles, but when it reaches the yeild strength it shatters (at least in non-composite form).
Also, because it is a metallic glass, it is inherently a meta-stable solid.... metals usually have relatively simple crystal structures, and thusly crystalize quickly with relatively small undercooling. The clever trick with this stuff is that it's a mix of four or five metallic elements that have a large span of atomic radii (this stuff is Zr-Ni-Cu-Ti-Be, various weightings of each, usually the Ni=Cu=Ti). Anyhow, when it finally does crystallize, whether due to heat, fatigue or constant strain, it forms a pretty complex crystal structure (I don't recall which one offhand) that allows very little motion of dislocations. Thus, it's super brittle when in it's thermodynamically stable state. Moreover, even with this clever alloying, it still requires high cooling rates to avoid crystallization from the melt, and is thusly hard to cast into large ingots.
Thus, whether it takes too hard an impact (can never be a tooling metal or knife, in pure form) or is under strain for too long (can never ever be a structural metal - too flaw sensitive in pure form and too expensive to process and machine in composite form) it will fail catastrophically.
Basically, this means it's pretty useless for most applications metals are required for (due to lack of crystal structure it's also a poor heat conductor - sorry overclockers). And because it is opaque, it can't be used for traditional glass applications. Liquid Metal has been around for a while trying to push the golf clubs, for at least three years, more like four or five, so I'm not sure what the sudden attention is for. We ran a back of the evelope calculation in my research group: Say you're on the links, and you mis-strike the ball, and hit a large rock in the ground with a non-composite liquidmetal club... basically you'll shatter the face of the head (only the face is amorphous due to process/cost/strength issues), sending shrapnel flying into your ankle. Yum.
Still, from a physics perspective, this stuff is really interesting due to its completely artificial nature (you'll never find anything close to this in nature) and odd mechanical properties (it's the metallic version of flubber). Commericially, in bulk form, I'd say they should shy away from structural applications and perhaps try transformers, where the thin film versions of amorphous metals have significant gains over silicon.