Thermostable Material Keeps Its Volume From -269 to 1126° Celsius
If you take scandium, aluminum, wolfram, and oxygen mix them in a specific way you will get an ultra-thermostable material. It keeps it cool in temperatures that start near the absolute zero to more than 1,000° Celsius.
Image by Iván Tamás from Pixabay
- Be also sure to check out my other posts and follow me @kralizec and subscribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube Channel
Many materials change their volume when their temperature changes. And it makes sense because when things get hot, their molecules move faster and thus need more space. Recently, Australian material scientists developed a new material that is one of the most thermally stable materials we ever saw.
This incredible material is a mixture of scandium, aluminum, wolfram, and oxygen (Sc1,5Al0,5W3O12). It keeps its volume in an incredible range of temperatures. From -269 to 1126° Celsius. According to its creators from the University of New South Wales, this is the broadest range of temperatures any material can be used at. And plenty of engineers will be more than happy to see it used in applications that will face extreme temperature changes.
For example, this material will find its place when developing aircraft or even space technologies where sudden temperature changes happen every day in a blink of an eye. Some of you might have heard the story of the “Kosa” SR-71 Blackbird that expanded so much when it reached its maximum speed of 3.4 Mach that it had problems with its fuel tanks.
The new material is completely oblivious to temperatures close to absolute zero while also not caring about the temperatures you could expect from a plane that reaches Mach 5. But the material will also find its place in less extreme environments as many components – for example in biomedicine – can’t handle even the tiniest changes in volume because of temperature change.
And as it tends to be, the material was discovered by accident. Neeraj Sharma – the lead of the research – acknowledged that he and his colleagues were experimenting with materials while developing batteries and one day they just found this material with its incredible properties.
The researchers measured the properties at a special system called Echidna. This high-resolution powder diffractometer can be found at the Australian Synchrotron and the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering. They found out that the material is truly exceptionally thermally stable. Compared to other materials, when heated the bonds between atoms practically don’t move, nor do the atoms rotate. Why this works isn’t exactly understood at this point but it does work.
Sharma and his team will certainly experiment further with the materials. They want to fine-tune the mixture, especially as scandium is rarer and rarer and thus more expensive. If they found a way to replace it that would go a long way towards seeing it in practical applications.
Sources:
- If you like the content I’m producing about science maybe you will like the content I produce about gaming as well! Be sure to check out my other posts!