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This advanced material could be a game-changer for temperature critical applications

Posted by johnnorman on July 05, 2021 - 11:21am

This advanced material could be a game-changer for temperature critical applications

Developed from various elements, the material did not change in volume at temperatures ranging from 4 to 1,400 Kelvin

For those of you who are naturaly inquisitive about technology then is will probably interest you, while most will just yawn!!

Written by Fiasal Khan on 22nd June

Researchers have performed some groundbreaking work when it comes to developing various materials, which have the potential of being used in futuristic applications. A couple of months ago, I talked about a metamaterial that can “think” and respond via preprogrammed reactions. More recently, I wrote about self-aware & multifunctional materials — these scalable materials can sense and powers themselves.

Using the instruments at ANSTO’s Australian Synchrotron and Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering, scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have taken this one step further. The researchers were candid enough to admit that they made the discovery of the novel material, more or less by accident. Conducting batteries-based research, they came across this material with a singular property of being thermally stable in a wide range of temperatures.

This new zero thermal expansion (ZTE) material made of scandium, aluminum, tungsten & oxygen did not change in volume at temperatures ranging from 4 to 1,400 Kelvin (-269 to 1126 °C, -452 to 2059 °F). Despite constituting various elements, the material held stable with only minor changes to the bonds, the position of oxygen atoms, and rotations of the atom arrangements.

“We were conducting experiments with these materials in association with our batteries-based research, for unrelated purposes, and fortuitously came across this singular property of this particular composition.”

~ Prof. Neeraj Sharma, Lead Researcher

The newly developed material (Sc1.5 Al0.5 WO12) can have some futuristic use cases in fields like aerospace design, where components are exposed to extreme cold in space and extreme heat at launch or on re-entry. The discovery could truly be a game-changer, considering the material volume stays the same from close to absolute zero to a heat factor that one would expect on the wing of a hypersonic aircraft traveling at Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound).

It could even be used in medical implants, where even a smallish thermal expansion can cause critical issues. The material’s thermal stability was verified by the measurement using Echidna high-resolution powder diffractometer. For novices, who are wondering how is this a big deal, just imagine that a small amount of heat applied to any material causes atoms to gain energy and change the bonding structure between molecules — thus changing the volume as well.

In this case, however, the material stays stable across such a wide of temperature variations. Researchers are still trying to figure out the exact mechanism at play here, but the orientation of atoms, their bonds & minor changes in their bonds might have something to do with it. Most of the elements used to create the material are abundantly available — with the exception of scandium, which is rarer and more costly.

They are working on finding cheaper & stable alternatives for scandium — without losing the thermal stability of the material. For now, slightly different ratios of the elements did not show the zero thermal expansion. Complete Research was published in the Journal Chemistry of Materials.

Link to Article

Corneliu Boghian thanks for sharing
July 9, 2021 at 12:34pm
Bill Rippel This is very interesting. This material could be used in many applications.
July 5, 2021 at 3:27pm
M H Though I am not good in technical science I can imagine that material with extreme temperature stability opens a lot of new use possibilities
July 5, 2021 at 1:46pm