Metallic glass: The strongest, toughest material yet?

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>> I'm Robert Ritchie, and I work here at the University of California and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. I work on structural materials, which are materials that you might make airplane frames, engines, bridges out of. And the problems with these materials is you'd like them to be as strong or as hard as possible, but when they get strong, when you make them strong or very hard, they become very prone to fracture. So what I try to do is make materials that are both tough, resistant to fracture, and strong as well. We're working on metallic glasses, and these are materials like windowpane glasses, which don't have any crystalline structure. They're like a frozen liquid. We can make these materials extremely strong, but they have remarkable resistance to fracture, and so this is a situation where we can get both a strong and a tough material, which is sort of the ideal for structural materials. The basic thing is to take the material and break it. We pull it and twist it and break it into two pieces, and then we examine how it failed. Sometimes we can break it in the microscope and see cracks propagating, so we can see the process of failure. These are generally electron microscopes. We also use X-rays in the Synchrotron here at the lab, and we can see then the structure of materials as they fail. The idea is basically not simply to measure their properties, but to understand why these materials have the properties that they do. It's very difficult to say what our materials will be used for, but potential applications are things like engine materials, air frames. I think real application may be awhile off. I'm always driven by the science. It's like a detective story. If something breaks, to find out why it breaks. I think that's the thing that drives me. I find that a very fascinating topic.

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