
Apple Buys Out LiquidMetal Patents To Stay One Step Ahead In Materials Game - aaronbrethorst
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/08/09/apple-buys-out-liquidmetal-patents-to-stay-one-step-ahead-in-materials-game/
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JoelSutherland
My cousin worked for LiquidMetal a number of years back (7-10 or so) when
their primary market was golf clubs. Even back then it was well known within
the company that the long-term plan was mobile devices. They even had a few
prototypes made in China to help with pitches.

LiquidMetal is substantially stronger than other metals. It's not about the
bouncing. It is perfect for saving weight and especially thickness. At the
time the only issue was cost, but I assume they have covered good ground on
that front over the last decade.

As for the technology itself, my understanding is that they cool the alloy in
a particular way that leaves its molecules unaligned -- like a liquid. This
makes it much stronger.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal>

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hop
Apple acquired a real gem. I hope they don't just sit on the IP for their own
use, this material can make many other great products.

 _Liquidmetal alloys achieved yield strength of over 1723 MPa, nearly twice
the strength of conventional crystalline titanium alloys._

That's some material science porn, liquid metal products can use a fraction
the amount of material to achieve the same strength as other metals. This will
be great for bikes, electric cars, knives, all types of springs, spaceships,
hammers, more efficient engines, those desktop swinging balls... Breakthroughs
like this don't happen often.

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qwzybug
Amorphous, highly elastic materials (glass comes to mind) are often not great
for long-wearing designs like bicycles. At least to present, amorphous metals
wear more like glass or carbon fibre than steel: invisible structural damage
leads to quick catastrophic failure. Rather than dings you get severed seat
tubes and exploding wheels. For the time being, no one's invented anything
better than cro-moly steel for the good old bicycle.

It does sound like an utterly fascinating material, however. The slow, glass-
like viscosity curve would be an amazing property to play with.

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hop
Yeah, I was thinking more for componentry. Won't replace carbon fiber
composite frames.

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Tycho
Reminds me of Rearden metal. With metal that unique, maybe they'll come up
with some radical designs/products. Kinetic charger for touchscreen devices?
Fold-up iPad?

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cma
To the disappointment of Ayn Rand fans everywhere, this 'Rearden' metal
originated in the (government-funded) public university system. :P

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hop
I think it's great CalTech has done so much work on such a marketable,
revolutionary product. With all the money that flows to universities for
research, I hope for more this. Looking through the patents for liquid metal,
they are assigned to liquid metal technologies and not the university, but
perhaps caltech has some equity (doubt it though).

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musesum
Was researching whether LM could be applied to bicycle frames - probably not,
as per this Slashdot post:

This isn't going to replace structural metals any time soon. How do I know? I
did dynamic planar compressive strain experiments and ABAQUS on this stuff and
composites with this as the matrix for my senior thesis.

Being a metallic glass, it has all sorts of crazy properites, as mentioned in
the articles, but when it reaches the yeild strength it shatters (at least in
non-composite form).

Also, because it is a metallic glass, it is inherently a meta-stable solid....
metals usually have relatively simple crystal structures, and thusly
crystalize quickly with relatively small undercooling. The clever trick with
this stuff is that it's a mix of four or five metallic elements that have a
large span of atomic radii (this stuff is Zr-Ni-Cu-Ti-Be, various weightings
of each, usually the Ni=Cu=Ti). Anyhow, when it finally does crystallize,
whether due to heat, fatigue or constant strain, it forms a pretty complex
crystal structure (I don't recall which one offhand) that allows very little
motion of dislocations. Thus, it's super brittle when in it's
thermodynamically stable state. Moreover, even with this clever alloying, it
still requires high cooling rates to avoid crystallization from the melt, and
is thusly hard to cast into large ingots.

Thus, whether it takes too hard an impact (can never be a tooling metal or
knife, in pure form) or is under strain for too long (can never ever be a
structural metal - too flaw sensitive in pure form and too expensive to
process and machine in composite form) it will fail catastrophically.

Basically, this means it's pretty useless for most applications metals are
required for (due to lack of crystal structure it's also a poor heat conductor
- sorry overclockers). And because it is opaque, it can't be used for
traditional glass applications. Liquid Metal has been around for a while
trying to push the golf clubs, for at least three years, more like four or
five, so I'm not sure what the sudden attention is for. We ran a back of the
evelope calculation in my research group: Say you're on the links, and you
mis-strike the ball, and hit a large rock in the ground with a non-composite
liquidmetal club... basically you'll shatter the face of the head (only the
face is amorphous due to process/cost/strength issues), sending shrapnel
flying into your ankle. Yum.

Still, from a physics perspective, this stuff is really interesting due to its
completely artificial nature (you'll never find anything close to this in
nature) and odd mechanical properties (it's the metallic version of flubber).
Commericially, in bulk form, I'd say they should shy away from structural
applications and perhaps try transformers, where the thin film versions of
amorphous metals have significant gains over silicon.

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elblanco
Perhaps it might make a good ruggedization material? Apple appears to be
highly interested in materials that would make a portable product have a very
long life in your pocket (gorilla glass).

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nitrogen
They say in the video that it's a "metallic glass." I wonder if they figured
out a way to make it transparent, or maybe it can be used to turn the entire
surface of the device into a capacitive touch interface, on top of being
insanely strong and elastic.

I wonder if they (LiquidMetal) made any baseball bats in addition to their
golf clubs...

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marvin
The "metallic glass" name has nothing to do with transparency; the reason it
gets this name is that its atomic structure is identical to that of a glass.
The atoms in glass, liquidmetal and for that matter liquids, are not arranged
in a regular ordering like most solids are. They have an amorpheous structure,
where the atoms are "frozen" in a random network.

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nickpinkston
Isn't it obvious? An amorphous material can more easily be die-cast (like
injection molded) so that metal parts can be produced into final shape with
ease and precision.

This means that, when everyone else has caught up to their machining / laser
manufacturing, they'll suddenly have this magic ability to create strong
materials is very unique shapes with very high economies of scale.

At least that's my take...

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nanairo
I hope you are right... suddenly it doesn't seem that many other consumer
electronic companies are interested in material science. Are Dell, HP,
Motorola, Lenovo, etc... trying to catch up with laser manufacturing?

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abstractbill
What exactly is patented here? My guess would be that you cannot actually
patent a material, but that you can patent a _process_ for manufacturing a
material. That's the way it seems to me things should work. Does anyone know
if that's the case?

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skymt
This appears to be the primary patent in question:
<http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=2EkUAAAAEBAJ>

It is indeed a method patent.

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gacba
My first response when I saw the title was that Apple was acquiring the
necessary materials to build Terminators...whoa. Need more coffee.

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mkramlich
my prediction: you drop a nextgen iPhone, it hits the ground, _BOUNCES_ right
back up into your hand again. ;)

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teyc
battery life extenders? drop your iphone to recharge it?

