Special steel finds real applications.A steel that's both strong and flexible may owe its unusual combination of properties to quasicrystals in its microscopic microscopic /mi·cro·scop·ic/ (mi?kro-skop´ik) 1. of extremely small size; visible only by the aid of the microscope. 2. pertaining or relating to a microscope or to microscopy. structure, says Jan-Olof Nilsson of AB Sandvik Steel in Sandviken, Sweden
Sandviken is an industrial town (pop. . Quasicrystals are exotic materials whose atoms are well-ordered but do not take on a repeating atomic arrangement (SN: 10/12/96, p. 232). The steel--an alloy alloy (ăl`oi, əloi`) [O. Fr.,=combine], substance with metallic properties that consists of a metal fused with one or more metals or nonmetals. of iron with 10 other elements--is packed with quasicrystal particles <onlyinclude> This is a list of particles in particle physics, including currently known and hypothetical elementary particles, as well as the composite particles that can be built up from them. between 1 and 10 nanometers across. Sandvik manufactures about 100 tons of the steel per year, and the company recently has determined that quasicrystals make up about 1 percent of the material's composition. Other steels of this type do not contain quasicrystals. "To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first examples of the use of quasicrystals in a commercial alloy," Nilsson says. The steel is used to make delicate surgical instruments A surgical instrument is a specially designed tool or device for performing specific actions of carrying out desired effects during a surgery or operation, such as modifying biological tissue, or to provide access or viewing it. that require both hardness and flexibility. During eye surgery, for example, it would be unacceptable for a needle to break, Nilsson notes. This year, the steel found its way into less exacting, but more common, devices: electric razors. |
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