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Six
Sigma Module 5: Project Selection
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INSIGHT
It could be the new superhero of metals. More than twice as strong as titanium and steel, it doesn't rust and it can be cast like plastic and honed to an edge as sharp as glass. And like any superhero, it has a weakness: don't heat it too much, or it loses its strength. The fruit of a 1992 discovery at the California Institute of Technology, the alloy, called Liquidmetal, has already been used in golf clubs. And it may soon show up in cell phone casings, baseball bats and scalpels. Liquidmetal Technologies, the Lake Forest, Calif. company that is trying to commercialize the alloy, is not shy about calling it revolutionary. "It combines uniquely a material with exceptional properties and the ability to process the material to exceptional shapes," says Dr. Michael Ashby, professor of engineering at Cambridge University in Britain and an advisor to the company. Liquidmetal's surprising properties come of a structure different from ordinary metals. When a conventional metal cools, it forms grains, each a small crystal where the atoms are oriented in a grid. The boundaries between these grains are a metal's weak points -- it's where cracks can form and rust starts, for instance. Scientists discovered in 1959 that if some alloys are cooled very quickly the atoms don't have time to form crystals. Instead, they remain jumbled, as in a liquid or in glass. However, the only way to cool the molten metal fast enough was to make it in thin strips or as a sprayed coating. The strips couldn't be joined, because they were hard to forge, and heat allowed the atoms to crystallize again. Because of their unique magnetic properties, the strips still found use in the anti-theft tags used by retail stores and in electrical transformers. The metal was also used to spray-coat oil drill pipes to protect them from wear. In 1992, Dr. William Johnson and Dr. Atakan Pekers at the Caltech discovered a way around the cooling problem. They made an alloy of elements that fit very poorly together: titanium, copper, nickel, zirconium and beryllium. These elements' atoms are of different sizes so they don't readily form crystals, even when cooled slowly. Pieces up to an inch thick could now be made. Liquidmetal Technologies - www.liquidmetalgolf.com/ - seized on the opportunity, and together with Caltech and Howmet Metal Mold of Whitehall, Mich., developed casting techniques. In the mold, Liquidmetal reveals another quality: it doesn't shrink when it solidifies. Ordinary metals do, meaning the product is rough out of the mold and needs machining. "What happens with Liquidmetal, in essence, is that you can form parts sort of the way you form plastics," says John Kang, chief executive of Liquidmetal Technologies. Liquidmetal can be cast with a precision down to 1 micron, or 1/ 25,000th of an inch, according to Johnson, now an adviser to Liquidmetal Technologies. Given a good die, it is possible to cast a scalpel blade and have it come sharp out of the mold. » Continued Page: 1 | 2
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