Allegheny Technologies Inc., Pittsburgh, has extended its long-term titanium products supply agreement with the Boeing Co. It covers value-added titanium mill products and provides opportunity for greater use of ATI’s next-generation and advanced titanium alloys in both long product and flat-rolled product forms. For example, ATI 425 titanium alloy is a continuously processed alpha+beta alloy with strength comparable to Ti 6-4 and improved formability.
Engineers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, have made extremely flexible electrical conductors by embedding networks of spherical gold nanoparticles in polyurethane. To find out what happened as the material stretched, the team took state-of-the-art electron microscope images of the materials at various tensions. The nanoparticles started out dispersed, but under strain, they could filter through the minuscule gaps in the polyurethane, connecting in chains as they would in a solution.
Kennametal, Latrobe, Pa., has developed Ultraflex, a new portfolio of brazed claddings for components with complex geometries in power generation, oil and gas, and many other industries. Combining tungsten carbide-based materials with super alloy-based technologies from Kennametal Stellite, UltraFlex provides metallurgical-bonded, void-free cladding that provides longer and more predictable service life for critical components in the most demanding environments.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Germany, announces that it has joined forces with EV Group, Albany, N.Y., to develop equipment and process technology to enable electrically conductive and optically transparent direct wafer bonds at room temperature.
Researchers at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., have developed a transparent, bioinspired coating that makes ordinary glass tough, self-cleaning, and extremely slippery. Researchers produce the ultraslippery coating by building a glass honeycomb-like structure with craters (left in the diagram), coating it with a Teflon-like chemical (purple) that binds to the honeycomb cells to form a stable liquid film. That film repels droplets of both water and oily liquids (right).
