http://studentsforliberty.org/news/real-life-rearden-metal/
The world is looking more like Atlas Shrugged every day. This could be useful for high speed rail.
Anything that comes from a website dedicated to the ideology of Ayn Rand should be greeted with a very large dose of skepticism.
I just care about the metal and its applications.
Not much difference (reading between the lines) between bainite steel and some of the head-hardened rail processes, is there?
I’ll be very interested to see if Cola et al. put this process and its refinements/trade secrets in the public domain. (As, incidentally, he would have had to do if government-research supported… something the Web site carefully omits telling you…)
Chief drawback: heat it (and probably, deform it substantially when treated) and the microstructure ceases to be magical. They go at length into how good it works as ballistic armor – but a bit like Daffy Duck, ‘it can only do it once’. I’d also have to wonder if the martensite-layer problem in work-hardening rail contact surfaces would also occur with this stuff. (We, like they, won’t go into weldability yet…)
Be interesting to see how he does high-rate progressive quench with those cryo coolants when there are thick sections, or variability in section, in a given piece (not everything can be formed out of platelike sections before being final-treated).
Now that we have Rearden metal … we can move on to the real money shot: Gleepsite.
(It would be extra nice to be able to fabricate unobtanium in large sections, which is essentially the plan behind the current generation of huckster schemes involving flavors of 3D printing and fabrication. But of course it ceases to be unobtanium once you obtain it…)
RME
Unobtainium usually fails to form because of uncontrollable contamination from the adminisphere.
I thought it was unreformable confabulation from the adminisphere. The application of Larus-Atricilla management principles (derived from the much older work of Gaviota).
Gee, my nearly 40 years old Intro to Materials textbook has lots of info about Bainite in it. “There is nothing new under the sun.”
No, that is removed by sequestration.
Is that polar, nonpolar, or homopolar sequestration?
In my experience, I have also found that confabulation can be reduced – sometimes eliminated – by frustration as well.
Obviously! [;)]