A scientific research team of the California Institute of Technology is led by Dr. Marios Dimitriou. It created after 109 unsuccessful efforts, an amorphous palladium-based alloy. This damage- tolerant metallic glass demonstrates unprecedented levels of combined toughness and strength. It can be used in biomedical implants. The ideal material, says Marios Demetriou, a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology, has the advantage of being both strong and tough. This is a combination called damage tolerance, which is more difficult to come by than one might think. “Strength and toughness are actually very different, almost mutually exclusive,” he explains. “Generally, materials that are tough are also weak; those that are strong, are brittle.” Their new alloy—a combination of the noble metal palladium, a small fraction of silver, and a mixture of other metalloids—has shown itself in tests to have a combination of strength and toughness at a level that has not previously been seen in any other material.
“Our study demonstrates for the first time that this class of materials, the metallic glasses, has the capacity to become the toughest and strongest ever known,” Demetriou states.
What gives metallic glasses their unusual qualities is the fact that they are made of metals—with the inherent toughness that comes with that class of material—but have the internal structure of glass, and thus its strength and hardness. Despite its name, it is this internal structure that is the only glass like thing about metallic glass: the material is not transparent, Demetriou notes, and is both optically and electronically like metal.”It’s prohibitively expensive,” says Demetriou. “The cost is much too high for any large-scale, widespread use.”
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