Scientists Combined Three Metals To Make The Toughest Known Material On Earth

A new scientific enquiry has managed to figure out the toughest combination on Earth - literally. Turns out, a metallic alloy made of chromium, cobalt, and nickel (CrCoNi) has the most toughness ever recorded on Earth.

Owing to its impressive strength and ductility, scientists claim it has "outstanding damage tolerance." In addition, it appears that this alloy gets stronger as it gets cooler.

A team of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory defined their findings as "record-breaking" in a new study in the journal Science.

Berkeley Lab

Toughest material on Earth

"When you design structural materials, you want them to be strong but also ductile and resistant to fracture," said metallurgist Easo George, Governor's Chair for Advanced Alloy Theory and Development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.

If you¡¯ve ever seen a science teacher dunk stuff in liquid nitrogen, you know most materials get brittle as they get colder. This material does the opposite. ? https://t.co/AKOCIsOOsz

¡ª Berkeley Lab (@BerkeleyLab) December 12, 2022

This combination renders a high entropy alloy (HEA) which includes equal parts of all original elements. This combination lends the materials their high strength and ductility, or in other words, toughness.

Berkeley Lab

Also read: New Material That Cannot Be Explained Has Properties Of Plastic And Metal

"The toughness of this material near liquid helium temperatures (20 kelvin, -424 Fahrenheit) is as high as 500 megapascals square root meters. In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminium airframe in passenger aeroplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it's a staggering number," said study's co-leader Robert Ritchie, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the Chua Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley.

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References

Thakur, A. (2022, December 12). Combination Of These Three Metals Is The Toughest Known Material On Earth. NDTV.com. https://www.ndtv.com/science/combination-of-these-three-metals-is-the-toughest-known-material-on-earth-3599052

Liu, D., Yu, Q., Kabra, S., Jiang, M., Forna-Kreutzer, P., Zhang, R., Payne, M., Walsh, F., Gludovatz, B., Asta, M., Minor, A. M., George, E. P., & Ritchie, R. O. (2022). Exceptional fracture toughness of CrCoNi-based medium- and high-entropy alloys at 20 kelvin. Science, 378(6623), 978¨C983. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8070