It looks like it's a thin film that can bend, not a bulk material. Still, a non-conductive heat conducting material safer than beryllium oxide would be quite useful.
Thin sheets might not be that much of a drawback if you can layer and fuse them, or even better make a composite sandwich like sea shells. It's going to be interesting to see how it gets commercialized.
Clay printers already exist, so technically you already can. Of course you need an oven to bake the result afterwards, and it won't be this exotic new type of ceramic.
This sounds cool, but am I stupid for thinking that the whole point of ceramics is that they're already malleable? That's why we have ceramic crockery, etc..
I can see why that would be useful in some circumstances, but not the more common ones they describe. Why is it necessary that a ceramic heatsink for a phone be re-formed, rather than just cast in the correct shape to begin with?
It’s incredibly difficult to form conventional ceramics into “the correct shape to begin with” with even millimeter tolerances because it shrinks twice during production. First when the liquid from the slurry/clay evaporates, and again when the particles sinter together during firing in the kiln. Both of these are non-linear and can cause warping with complex geometries.
EDIT: binders also typically burn off during firing, which further complicates changing shape during firing.
It’s kind of amazing that you can get a ceramic container where the lid fits snuggly. Some of that comes from modifying the greenware (dried but unfired clay) but I think most of it is exacting tolerances for inputs and processing. Clay from this one quarry. This much water. These building temperatures and humidity. This exact furnace temperature and time.
One can fire a pot with the lid on it in the kiln. They tend to deform together. Of course, this requires that the mating surfaces not fuse together and may also produce a non-rotationally-symmetric interface.
I feel like I've watched videos where people make Japanese and/or Korean ceramic cook pots and I can't for the life of me remember how they kept them from warping, just that they do.
The only trick I do remember is don't glaze the contact point between the two pieces. That not only adds thickness variability, but if glaze touches the bottom of the kiln you fuse to the bricks, so you have to elevate anything glazed, and elevating increases warping.
How do they create things like ceramic turbo turbines and ceramic exhaust manifolds? Seems like the shrinkage problem would prevent these close tolerances.
The same shrinkage problem exists for the ceramic tooth crowns.
The vendor of the dental ceramic provides a program that uses a mathematical model of the shrinkage to compute the form required for the ceramic crown before sintering.
Of course the mathematical model is not perfect so the dentist may still have to do some small adjustments to the sintered crown.
An oven doesn’t reach 300°C, blacksmiths work metal above 800°C, when it becomes ductile. Most of us don’t seem to have problems with that notion, except when discussing 9/11 that is.
If your computer is hitting oven temperatures you have a very big problem.
What is the material? What elements is it made of? They never mentioned in the article.
EDIT: Boron Nitride. I see it’s in the title of the linked paper. Why do articles emit such obviously pertinent information? sigh It’s all just narrative.
> Why do articles emit such obviously pertinent information? sigh It’s all just narrative.
That's because this is a press release (i.e. advertisement) from the associated university's communications department, not a news article or a scientific publication.
> "If you put an aluminum heatsink into an RF component, you've basically introduced a series of antennae to interact with the RF signal," Erb says. "Instead, we can put our boron nitride-based material in and around an RF component and it is essentially invisible to the RF signal."
It’s been a long while since Corningware was the coolest shit on the block. You find a ceramic that thermoforms above 300°C but below kiln temperature and you’ve got a more efficient production process for pans, for cooking to heat shields.
Hexagonal boron nitride (this is very similar to graphite, but is not electrically conductive) in a binder of (I think) boron oxide. The latter melts at 450 C, which isn't very high. The new thing here apparently is a process for aligning the particles of BN so the material has high thermal conductivity.
So this is both thermoformable, and also heat-conducting. My understanding is that ceramics are usually very much neither of those. Are those properties connected, or is this a coincidence? Are ceramics usually not thermoformable because they're insulating?
In this context, ceramic just means non-metal and non-organic. Plenty of ceramics have decent thermal conductivity - in fact, diamonds are ceramics and they are some of the most thermally conductive things ever. However, ceramics are very much not something you can thermoform. Even silicone (aka siloxane polymers) can’t be thermoformed. I’m not a huge ceramics expert but every ceramic I’ve ever used has been a thermoset.
It's hard to say. The pace of change is happening so fast, it's hard to predict.
Disclaimer: Massive hand-waving here
But, I think these exotic materials will be stepping stones to other things. I don't think we can get next-gen AI until we can build skeumorphic neural chips with memristor-type arrays with massive densities.
You can't get to nano-tech until you can predicatively arrange atoms. And once you can do that, you can only other exotic materials.
High temperature (or room temperature) super conductors will allow massive magnetic fields for common applications -- not just high-end MRI's that require cooling.
Graphene is so weird it can pretty much do anything.
I think the under-pinning for all these advances is material science. For me, it will be tech that looks like magic.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] thread(As long as it's cheaper than diamond!)
If you have a phone made of today's ceramics and drop in on concrete, and it cannot be deformed, it will shatter.
Since this new material can be malleable, when you drop your phone, it doesn't shatter.
EDIT: binders also typically burn off during firing, which further complicates changing shape during firing.
The only trick I do remember is don't glaze the contact point between the two pieces. That not only adds thickness variability, but if glaze touches the bottom of the kiln you fuse to the bricks, so you have to elevate anything glazed, and elevating increases warping.
The vendor of the dental ceramic provides a program that uses a mathematical model of the shrinkage to compute the form required for the ceramic crown before sintering.
Of course the mathematical model is not perfect so the dentist may still have to do some small adjustments to the sintered crown.
If your computer is hitting oven temperatures you have a very big problem.
EDIT: Boron Nitride. I see it’s in the title of the linked paper. Why do articles emit such obviously pertinent information? sigh It’s all just narrative.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202203939
That's because this is a press release (i.e. advertisement) from the associated university's communications department, not a news article or a scientific publication.
It's right there in the article.
It’s been a long while since Corningware was the coolest shit on the block. You find a ceramic that thermoforms above 300°C but below kiln temperature and you’ve got a more efficient production process for pans, for cooking to heat shields.
Graphene, memristors, strange ceramics, transparent aluminum, aerogel, etc. Lots of interesting things that look and act like magic.
Because, almost without exception, the former describes all human ages
It's hard to say. The pace of change is happening so fast, it's hard to predict.
Disclaimer: Massive hand-waving here
But, I think these exotic materials will be stepping stones to other things. I don't think we can get next-gen AI until we can build skeumorphic neural chips with memristor-type arrays with massive densities.
You can't get to nano-tech until you can predicatively arrange atoms. And once you can do that, you can only other exotic materials.
High temperature (or room temperature) super conductors will allow massive magnetic fields for common applications -- not just high-end MRI's that require cooling.
Graphene is so weird it can pretty much do anything.
I think the under-pinning for all these advances is material science. For me, it will be tech that looks like magic.