It's a copper-tantalum-lithium alloy: 96.5% Cu, 3% Ta, 0.5% Li.
Tantalum isn't soluble in copper and doesn't form any intermetallic compounds, so under normal circumstances you'd get something like a metal matrix composite -- pure tantalum particles dispersed in a copper matrix. Add lithium, though, and the intermetallic Cu3Li forms, and tantalum is apparently very attracted to this stuff, so you end up with Cu3Li particles with Ta shells in that copper matrix.
Yield Strength = ~1000MPa, so it's genuinely on par with high-temp nickel superalloys, though somewhat weaker than the cobalt-base ones, and far weaker than the best steels.
Interestingly, it's actually a little bit weaker than the copper-beryllium alloy C17200. (YS: ~1200-1300 MPa.) But CuBe is very expensive, not very ductile, and potentially hazardous. Tantalum, though expensive, is still 10x cheaper than beryllium.
Depending on its thermal and electrical properties, and on its ease of manufacture, this could be a very versatile material, and may replace nickel/cobalt alloys in certain applications.
The two outstanding things we get out of copper are thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity. If it converts, we get those properties in a mechanically strong material.
To put this into perspective: nickel is approximately 2x as expensive as copper, and cobalt is 5-6 times as expensive, and the major cobalt producers are all politically problematic (DR Congo, China, Russia).
That isn't contradictory with "the major sources of cobalt (congo, russia, china) are problematic - it just implies that congo/russia/china have copper/nickel mines too.
And to state the obvious, just because cobalt is usually a byproduct of copper mining, doesn't mean that copper mining usually produces cobalt as a byproduct.
True. OTOH less tantalum is needed than cobalt would be needed for alternative alloys. Maybe the production of Rwanda, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia could suffice.
In the use cases imagined for this material, the cost of the base metals is basically irrelevant. Something like a jet turbine blade might have maybe 10$ worth of material, but after machining and a hundred other steps is worth 100x that ammount. A heatshield for a hypersonic missile? Maybe a kilo of copper, but perhaps a 1m+ purchase price
More affordable price seriously widens the range of applications, and thus the total addressable market. Not using hazardous substances like berillium additionally helps.
But it doesnt look very affordable. The process for making this stuff seems very involved. I dont think this will ever be a cheaper option, rather it will be something that offers new abilities unlike any existing material. So it will be for new use cases, not displacing existing materials.
No material is cheap when it has just been developed. Titanium alloys were science fiction in the 1980s, and now I can find titanium camping forks and mugs for €10.
Special steels can also cost a fortune (powder metallurgy, superduplex).
There are many more foundries and workshops producing copper alloys than nickel alloys. The supply chain is much simpler and more diverse.
Copper recycling is a reality, but nickel alloy recycling is less so. Significant efforts are being made to reduce dependence on rare metals. No one really knows which ones will actually break through in the future. But having more options is always a good thing.
This isn't true actually. Aerospace grade aluminum, for example, is much more expensive and since you want to minimize weight with ortho- and iso-grids, you're throwing at least 50% of the material away. Another problem is that you not only need to consider the "base metal" of the part you're cutting, but also the cost of the tools that do the cutting (ignore the machine itself). You're consuming a lot of expensive endmills to get rid of the material.
It does not mention corrosion resistance or thermal fatigue at all, but a copper-based alloy with good dimensional stability and thermal conductivity could be an interesting alternative to Inconel alloys for heat exchanger tubes.
English is not my native language. I am referring to fatigue caused by thermal cycling. Annealing for one year is done to test the chemical stability of the alloy and ensure that there is no migration or segregation of alloy elements.
There may be unstable hydrodynamic phenomena in a pipe or heat exchanger, which generates a large number of thermal cycles. Such as the instability of a vortex in a mixing or heat exchange zone.
This is a different ageing mechanism. It is very complicated and time-consuming to test in the laboratory.
Mild steel for rebar, sure. But even the average tool steel exceeds ~1400MPa, and today's most advanced maraging steels can hit 3000MPa. Steel wire can get even stronger than that.
Wonder if this could work for li-ion batteries as a current collector? You could potentially lower charging times and handle higher power applications and higher temperature ranges.
Could this material be a cost-effective replacement for stainless steel? I'm thinking of applications where the antimicrobial properties of copper would be beneficial.
>Could this material be a cost-effective replacement for stainless steel?
Iron ore costs $~100/ton, The cost of copper ore is hard to find (possibly because there are so many types, and because it tends to be processed locally AFAICT) but you're looking at ~$5000/ton.
So the raw-material cost should be about 50x, and apparently stainless steel costs ~$2500/ton so even if the processing is free you're already 2x the price.
So, no. Copper is about as rare as lithium, for context. Iron is an amazingly cheap metal.
Hot water heater tanks, dishes, silverware, handrails, air conditioner heat exchangers? But in a lot of cases you can just electroplate a strong alloy with copper, brass, or silver.
The high temperature talked about in the article is close to 800 Celsius. That far exceeds home or even most industrial appliances. The primary use would be in turbines where the combination of strength and heat conductivity can keep the blades from melting and improve efficiency.
No, they don’t. The force a man can apply does not require "high strength" materials to withstand. They don’t need high temperature performance, either. Seriously, we don’t need superalloy spoons.
When we’re talking about advanced materials, "high strength" means hundreds of MPa and "high temperature" is beyond 500°C (and more depending on the application).
Any material can withstand the force a man (or a woman) can apply if you make it thick enough. Contrapositively, if you make it too thin, it can't. So sign me the fuck up for the superalloy spoons, but hold the nickel, please.
(It would be excellent to be able to clean my silverware by firing it in a kiln, though with a copper alloy I'd probably have to scrub off the verdigris.)
Depends on what is meant by high strength. Silverware is a fair point that hadn't occurred to me. Handrails is an interesting one but I suspect it's more cost effective to place a thin contact surface on top of something cheap.
The others I'm not so sure about. I think you'd have corrosion issues with water tanks and bacterial issues there are easily addressed by regulating temperature. And why would heat exchangers require particularly high strength? Since when are those a structural component?
In any case as you said electroplating something cheap is probably the way to go.
Recuperator-type heat exchangers need high-strength materials because both the strength of a wall and its thermal resistance are proportional to its thickness. So, if you can magically make copper five times stronger, you can make it one fifth as thick, cutting its thermal resistance by a factor of 5 and getting a much better heat exchanger.
As for water tanks, regulating temperature is not always "easy", and a major reason copper is used for water pipes is its great resistance to corrosion. In this case apparently it will be more expensive than the same mass of stainless, but it's apparently also stronger than stainless, so maybe you can use less of it, making it cheaper again.
Fair point about water pipe corrosion, my mistake. Although thinking about it more carefully what is strength saving you there other than cost? This material is going to be at least a 10x cost premium judging by the elemental composition. And if we're talking household temperatures I expect there are polymer coatings that would work better.
The heat exchanger point is interesting. However doesn't stainless already lose out to 3D printed aluminum for the sort of applications where the optimization is worth the cost? This material is even heaver than steel and substantially more expensive.
It's tangential but I wonder how amenable to 3D printing this material will prove to be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43816979 suggested that the raw materials imply about a 6x cost increase over stainless, which is less than 10x. I haven't done the numbers myself.
High-energy cryogenic ball milling of 10 grams for four hours in a continuous flow of liquid nitrogen under an argon atmosphere with <1ppm oxygen (https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...) sounds expensive, but maybe they only did it that way because it was a low-risk way to ensure the alloying worked with the lab equipment they had on hand, not because it's the cheapest way to make the material. Hopefully cheaper ways are found.
I'm no expert in heat exchangers, but my calculations suggest 3-D printing is or will be an enormous boost there, and may reverse the gradient of merit for wall material thermal conductivity, favoring good thermal insulators over good thermal conductors like copper and aluminum. As for aluminum, it is only suitable for low temperatures.
6x for the raw materials before you account for the production process.
I'm curious. What mechanism would lead to an insulator being favored in a heat exchanger?
Fair point about aluminum and temperature. As a layman an engine block is high temperature to me. I guess this would be extremely useful for more exotic stuff.
If the fluid path through the heat exchanger is very short and the contact area is very large, preventing lengthwise conduction of heat from one end of the fluid path to the other, rather than getting enough conduction between the fluids, should become the performance-limiting factor. See https://dercuano.github.io/notes/capillary-heat-exchanger.ht....
I could be wrong about this, but I didn't just make it up; I got it from Lingai Luo's book on heat and mass transfer intensification, which hopefully I've understood correctly.
No I think you've understood that correctly. I'd count that as one of those things that's blindingly obvious once it's pointed out but not until then.
With 3D printing I wonder if you could insert bands of insulator into an otherwise conductive wall? But you're dealing with large (potentially ridiculously so) temperature ranges so I wonder if it would prove difficult to match the thermal properties of the two materials closely enough.
I now have the weirdest desire to play with heat exchanger designs that I have absolutely zero use for. I've been nerd sniped.
I doubt antimicrobial matters much there (don't you wash your knives before and after use?) but the idea of a copper knife without significant loss of strength is neat. I want one already.
If it's hardness is in the mid 50 it will make some badass looking knife. And something with the thin profile of guyto but with the heft of a Chineese cleaver will be interesting to use.
But even if suitable - it will be mostly novelty I guess. Still want one.
Nope... this stuff is 96.5% copper, and copper is ~3x as expensive as stainless steel. Even if tantalum and lithium were free, it would be substantially more expensive. Tantalum is not free, though. It's a very expensive material at about 100x the cost per kg relative to stainless steel, so it nearly doubles the cost of the raw material inputs by itself with its 3% contribution. The process of making this alloy is also likely to be expensive.
I'm also not sure how much being in an alloy would impact the antimicrobial effects of copper.
It is unlikely that it has better corrosion properties than a cheaper copper alloy, like copper-nickel alloy.
This new alloy is useful only for high-temperature applications, like turbines and heat exchangers, where its main advantage over the existing alloys (based on nickel or cobalt) is its much higher thermal conductivity.
Moreover, the kinds of stainless steel that have little or no nickel content (e.g. ferritic, martensitic, superferritic, duplex, manganese-austenitic) will always have a price several times lower than any copper alloy.
This copper alloy will be rather expensive due to the high cost of tantalum. However the content in tantalum is small, so the price will remain acceptable for its applications.
Plain copper is already too expensive for power lines, and this alloy is more expensive than copper alone. Transmission and distribution lines are typically made with aluminum conductors layered over a steel core for mechanical strength:
Aluminum is a worse conductor than copper on a volumetric basis but a better conductor on a mass basis, which is important for overhead lines supporting their own weight against gravity. It also costs significantly less than copper.
This could be useful in heat exchangers and rocket engine thrust chambers. I imagine this has very high thermal conductivity compared to steels. The thermal conductivity of copper is about 20x that of stainless steel. So, you can make the walls of the passages an order of magnitude thicker, increasing their strength proportionally.
For a bicycle frame, we want an alloy that is relatively light and easy to weld.
At no point is weldability considered, and it is not impossible that this alloy welds very poorly (losing its properties in the area thermally affected by welding, requires a very narrow energy range to weld properly).
The advantages of this alloy do not make it a better choice than special steels or titanium alloys when it comes to metallic materials.
Pressurised water reactors use Inconel tubes. Inconel 600 alloys are high-chromium nickel alloys for steam exchange tubes that are highly resistant to various forms of corrosion (capable of withstanding to 30 years in water with boric acid and 300°C+).
The design of these alloys and exchangers is extremely complex and benefits from several thousand years of operational experience. This applies to the alloys themselves, their heat treatment, shaping, interaction with other materials, ageing, etc.
It is highly unlikely that these alloys will be abandoned in the next 20-30 years.
It's difficult to predict. High performance heat exchangers are an obvious application, but the potential is great for many other things.
"Nuclear plants?"
Sure. One of the most challenging problems in a PWRs is heat exchange; the so called "steam generators" that circulate primary and secondary water, for instance. They're huge, expensive heat exchangers and their primary failure mode is cracking. A durable, high temperature, high thermal conductivity copper based alloy goes directly to this. Better thermal conductivity could make these devices substantially smaller, reducing costs in all sorts of way, or enable novel designs.
Yep. Cracking is a subtle process. This new material and the new designs based on it will be either better or worse than the nickel alloys that have been used, but only time will tell. At least an opportunity exists for improvement now.
Efficient and less polluting coal plants. To approach 50% or more efficiency when converting the thermal energy of coal to electricity the temperature must exceed 700C, but that brings all kind of problems as it presently requires exotic alloys.
Coal is problematic due to ash and sulfur. Natural gas-fired plants, OTOH, are not going anywhere for next few decades. And even if they go, and get replaced with nuclear or even fusion, the steam generation step does not go way anyway.
Legitimate content aside, this article is a perfect example of modern public relations writing, of flash over substance. Each paragraph is larded with PR buzzwords like "breakthrough," "cutting-edge," "groundbreaking," etc. to the degree that the topic is nearly lost in the lexical shrubbery.
And it's clear the article's author doesn't understand scientific writing. Each participant is identified as having a PhD (when true), contrary to accepted academic practice. Imagine a scientific article by Albert Einstein, tagged with "PhD" -- except that in 1905, any relevance aside, Einstein didn't have one. My point is that the participants' academic degrees are irrelevant to the science. As Richard Feynman said, "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion". Oh -- wait -- did I mention that Feynman had a PhD?
My favorite phrase from an article that tries to raise empty PR prose to an art form: "... Lehigh is the only university in the Lehigh Valley to have this designation ..." Noted. But this is like saying, "We're tops in our ZIP code!"
Unlike typical grain boundaries that migrate over time at high temperatures, this complexion acts as a structural stabilizer, maintaining the nanocrystalline structure, preventing grain growth and dramatically improving high-temperature performance.
The alloy holds its shape under extreme, long-term thermal exposure and mechanical stress, resisting deformation even near its melting point, noted Patrick Cantwell, a research scientist at Lehigh University and co-author of the study.
"""
This sounds exotic, but possibly better performing in some use cases?
I'm tired of articles with titles like "X makes Y bigger/faster/stronger," then never giving an answer to the obvious question: "How much?"
This article is happy to tell you it costs $25M to develop , how many hours the annealed the metal, the patent numbers, the years the researchers got their degrees, but never once gives a single number related to the materials performance. Maybe its 0.1% better, maybe its 1000% better. I guess its not important.
There's a few numbers in the Science article, and they do actually link to it, unlike some. [0
And the intro numbers are... Exciting.
> This core-shell structure neither dissolves nor coarsens at temperatures of up to 800°C while also causing the yielding strength to be in excess of 1 gigapascal.
In other words, it makes the copper allow much stronger than mild steels, like the stainless steels, and on par with strong (but by far not the strongest) steel alloys.
Imagine cutting stainless steel with a copper-based blade, and not the other way around.
Well not as strong as the best steels, but still stronger than many common steels. Even some less special bronze alloys can beat common steels in strength.
Okay, this is cool.
It's a copper-tantalum-lithium alloy: 96.5% Cu, 3% Ta, 0.5% Li.
Tantalum isn't soluble in copper and doesn't form any intermetallic compounds, so under normal circumstances you'd get something like a metal matrix composite -- pure tantalum particles dispersed in a copper matrix. Add lithium, though, and the intermetallic Cu3Li forms, and tantalum is apparently very attracted to this stuff, so you end up with Cu3Li particles with Ta shells in that copper matrix.
Yield Strength = ~1000MPa, so it's genuinely on par with high-temp nickel superalloys, though somewhat weaker than the cobalt-base ones, and far weaker than the best steels.
Interestingly, it's actually a little bit weaker than the copper-beryllium alloy C17200. (YS: ~1200-1300 MPa.) But CuBe is very expensive, not very ductile, and potentially hazardous. Tantalum, though expensive, is still 10x cheaper than beryllium.
Depending on its thermal and electrical properties, and on its ease of manufacture, this could be a very versatile material, and may replace nickel/cobalt alloys in certain applications.
The two outstanding things we get out of copper are thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity. If it converts, we get those properties in a mechanically strong material.
To put this into perspective: nickel is approximately 2x as expensive as copper, and cobalt is 5-6 times as expensive, and the major cobalt producers are all politically problematic (DR Congo, China, Russia).
Isn't cobalt basically a byproduct of copper mining though?
Googled it and the Cobolt Institute says:
> the vast majority is produced as a by-product from large scale copper and nickel mines
That isn't contradictory with "the major sources of cobalt (congo, russia, china) are problematic - it just implies that congo/russia/china have copper/nickel mines too.
And to state the obvious, just because cobalt is usually a byproduct of copper mining, doesn't mean that copper mining usually produces cobalt as a byproduct.
Tantalum is a conflict resource (DRC).
True. OTOH less tantalum is needed than cobalt would be needed for alternative alloys. Maybe the production of Rwanda, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia could suffice.
In the use cases imagined for this material, the cost of the base metals is basically irrelevant. Something like a jet turbine blade might have maybe 10$ worth of material, but after machining and a hundred other steps is worth 100x that ammount. A heatshield for a hypersonic missile? Maybe a kilo of copper, but perhaps a 1m+ purchase price
More affordable price seriously widens the range of applications, and thus the total addressable market. Not using hazardous substances like berillium additionally helps.
But it doesnt look very affordable. The process for making this stuff seems very involved. I dont think this will ever be a cheaper option, rather it will be something that offers new abilities unlike any existing material. So it will be for new use cases, not displacing existing materials.
No material is cheap when it has just been developed. Titanium alloys were science fiction in the 1980s, and now I can find titanium camping forks and mugs for €10.
Special steels can also cost a fortune (powder metallurgy, superduplex).
There are many more foundries and workshops producing copper alloys than nickel alloys. The supply chain is much simpler and more diverse.
Copper recycling is a reality, but nickel alloy recycling is less so. Significant efforts are being made to reduce dependence on rare metals. No one really knows which ones will actually break through in the future. But having more options is always a good thing.
Not using beryllium will dramatically increases available uses, and it should be much cheaper after development.
Even firearm suppressors, high voltage electrical parts (especially in specific areas in ultra high power motors and switch contactors), etc.
This isn't true actually. Aerospace grade aluminum, for example, is much more expensive and since you want to minimize weight with ortho- and iso-grids, you're throwing at least 50% of the material away. Another problem is that you not only need to consider the "base metal" of the part you're cutting, but also the cost of the tools that do the cutting (ignore the machine itself). You're consuming a lot of expensive endmills to get rid of the material.
Australia is the fourth largest producer. There are efforts to scale it up, although there are issues with that https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-24/critical-minerals-ele...
It does not mention corrosion resistance or thermal fatigue at all, but a copper-based alloy with good dimensional stability and thermal conductivity could be an interesting alternative to Inconel alloys for heat exchanger tubes.
The article mentions one year test at 800C being annealed. I suppose you meant thermal cycles?
English is not my native language. I am referring to fatigue caused by thermal cycling. Annealing for one year is done to test the chemical stability of the alloy and ensure that there is no migration or segregation of alloy elements.
There may be unstable hydrodynamic phenomena in a pipe or heat exchanger, which generates a large number of thermal cycles. Such as the instability of a vortex in a mixing or heat exchange zone.
This is a different ageing mechanism. It is very complicated and time-consuming to test in the laboratory.
For reference, regular old structural steel is 250 to 350 MPa tensile yield strength.
Mild steel for rebar, sure. But even the average tool steel exceeds ~1400MPa, and today's most advanced maraging steels can hit 3000MPa. Steel wire can get even stronger than that.
Can you make decent bronze age sword out of it?
1000MPa is similar to the bolts used in automotive industry, so totally - but not with a bronze age style metallurgy.
Wonder if this could work for li-ion batteries as a current collector? You could potentially lower charging times and handle higher power applications and higher temperature ranges.
This might be a great alternative to beryllium copper for the spring contact element in high-current electrical connectors.
Could this material be a cost-effective replacement for stainless steel? I'm thinking of applications where the antimicrobial properties of copper would be beneficial.
>Could this material be a cost-effective replacement for stainless steel?
Iron ore costs $~100/ton, The cost of copper ore is hard to find (possibly because there are so many types, and because it tends to be processed locally AFAICT) but you're looking at ~$5000/ton.
So the raw-material cost should be about 50x, and apparently stainless steel costs ~$2500/ton so even if the processing is free you're already 2x the price.
So, no. Copper is about as rare as lithium, for context. Iron is an amazingly cheap metal.
I'm struggling to think of applications where both strength and antimicrobial properties matter. Isn't it usually one or the other?
Hot water heater tanks, dishes, silverware, handrails, air conditioner heat exchangers? But in a lot of cases you can just electroplate a strong alloy with copper, brass, or silver.
The high temperature talked about in the article is close to 800 Celsius. That far exceeds home or even most industrial appliances. The primary use would be in turbines where the combination of strength and heat conductivity can keep the blades from melting and improve efficiency.
Yes, I was only talking about combining near-room-temperature strength with antimicrobial properties, not the red-hot strength they're focused on.
None of those need high strength.
So says someone that's never used chintzy silverware.
The bar is at not-atrocious, not superalloy.
Have you even lived until you've folded a spoon trying to scoop ice cream with it? Woah, I guess I don't know my own strength!
Chunky stainless steel flatware is the best. Being able to get the same thing in copper without significant loss of strength would be awesome.
Bending iron horseshoes was a common party trick historically. Augustus II the Strong (king of PLC and elector of Saxonia) was known for doing it.
Sounds impossible if you don't realize the horseshoes weren't steel.
Actually, they all do.
No, they don’t. The force a man can apply does not require "high strength" materials to withstand. They don’t need high temperature performance, either. Seriously, we don’t need superalloy spoons.
When we’re talking about advanced materials, "high strength" means hundreds of MPa and "high temperature" is beyond 500°C (and more depending on the application).
Any material can withstand the force a man (or a woman) can apply if you make it thick enough. Contrapositively, if you make it too thin, it can't. So sign me the fuck up for the superalloy spoons, but hold the nickel, please.
(It would be excellent to be able to clean my silverware by firing it in a kiln, though with a copper alloy I'd probably have to scrub off the verdigris.)
Depends on what is meant by high strength. Silverware is a fair point that hadn't occurred to me. Handrails is an interesting one but I suspect it's more cost effective to place a thin contact surface on top of something cheap.
The others I'm not so sure about. I think you'd have corrosion issues with water tanks and bacterial issues there are easily addressed by regulating temperature. And why would heat exchangers require particularly high strength? Since when are those a structural component?
In any case as you said electroplating something cheap is probably the way to go.
Recuperator-type heat exchangers need high-strength materials because both the strength of a wall and its thermal resistance are proportional to its thickness. So, if you can magically make copper five times stronger, you can make it one fifth as thick, cutting its thermal resistance by a factor of 5 and getting a much better heat exchanger.
As for water tanks, regulating temperature is not always "easy", and a major reason copper is used for water pipes is its great resistance to corrosion. In this case apparently it will be more expensive than the same mass of stainless, but it's apparently also stronger than stainless, so maybe you can use less of it, making it cheaper again.
Fair point about water pipe corrosion, my mistake. Although thinking about it more carefully what is strength saving you there other than cost? This material is going to be at least a 10x cost premium judging by the elemental composition. And if we're talking household temperatures I expect there are polymer coatings that would work better.
The heat exchanger point is interesting. However doesn't stainless already lose out to 3D printed aluminum for the sort of applications where the optimization is worth the cost? This material is even heaver than steel and substantially more expensive.
It's tangential but I wonder how amenable to 3D printing this material will prove to be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43816979 suggested that the raw materials imply about a 6x cost increase over stainless, which is less than 10x. I haven't done the numbers myself.
High-energy cryogenic ball milling of 10 grams for four hours in a continuous flow of liquid nitrogen under an argon atmosphere with <1ppm oxygen (https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...) sounds expensive, but maybe they only did it that way because it was a low-risk way to ensure the alloying worked with the lab equipment they had on hand, not because it's the cheapest way to make the material. Hopefully cheaper ways are found.
I'm no expert in heat exchangers, but my calculations suggest 3-D printing is or will be an enormous boost there, and may reverse the gradient of merit for wall material thermal conductivity, favoring good thermal insulators over good thermal conductors like copper and aluminum. As for aluminum, it is only suitable for low temperatures.
6x for the raw materials before you account for the production process.
I'm curious. What mechanism would lead to an insulator being favored in a heat exchanger?
Fair point about aluminum and temperature. As a layman an engine block is high temperature to me. I guess this would be extremely useful for more exotic stuff.
If the fluid path through the heat exchanger is very short and the contact area is very large, preventing lengthwise conduction of heat from one end of the fluid path to the other, rather than getting enough conduction between the fluids, should become the performance-limiting factor. See https://dercuano.github.io/notes/capillary-heat-exchanger.ht....
I could be wrong about this, but I didn't just make it up; I got it from Lingai Luo's book on heat and mass transfer intensification, which hopefully I've understood correctly.
No I think you've understood that correctly. I'd count that as one of those things that's blindingly obvious once it's pointed out but not until then.
With 3D printing I wonder if you could insert bands of insulator into an otherwise conductive wall? But you're dealing with large (potentially ridiculously so) temperature ranges so I wonder if it would prove difficult to match the thermal properties of the two materials closely enough.
I now have the weirdest desire to play with heat exchanger designs that I have absolutely zero use for. I've been nerd sniped.
you're not making them thin enough
I was actually thinking of sinks, shower heads, door knobs, stuff like that.
Ships hulls?
Kitchen knife?
I doubt antimicrobial matters much there (don't you wash your knives before and after use?) but the idea of a copper knife without significant loss of strength is neat. I want one already.
Hear me out - copper-titanium damascuss.
Alex Steele did it, albeit with some nickel. It’s pretty cool looking.
If it's hardness is in the mid 50 it will make some badass looking knife. And something with the thin profile of guyto but with the heft of a Chineese cleaver will be interesting to use.
But even if suitable - it will be mostly novelty I guess. Still want one.
Sword!
Brewing beer. Pharmaceuticals. Any industrial use of bacteria under pressure.
Nope... this stuff is 96.5% copper, and copper is ~3x as expensive as stainless steel. Even if tantalum and lithium were free, it would be substantially more expensive. Tantalum is not free, though. It's a very expensive material at about 100x the cost per kg relative to stainless steel, so it nearly doubles the cost of the raw material inputs by itself with its 3% contribution. The process of making this alloy is also likely to be expensive.
I'm also not sure how much being in an alloy would impact the antimicrobial effects of copper.
You're right about the cost angle, though it might be cheaper than stellite, inconel, monel, that kind of thing.
Generally copper does retain its antibacterial properties in alloys where it's a high proportion of the alloy, like this one.
It is unlikely that it has better corrosion properties than a cheaper copper alloy, like copper-nickel alloy.
This new alloy is useful only for high-temperature applications, like turbines and heat exchangers, where its main advantage over the existing alloys (based on nickel or cobalt) is its much higher thermal conductivity.
Moreover, the kinds of stainless steel that have little or no nickel content (e.g. ferritic, martensitic, superferritic, duplex, manganese-austenitic) will always have a price several times lower than any copper alloy.
This copper alloy will be rather expensive due to the high cost of tantalum. However the content in tantalum is small, so the price will remain acceptable for its applications.
This material won't ever be cheap - all 3 ingredients cost a lot more than stainless steel.
would this be useful for better power lines? assuming electrical conductivity is about the same, as implied by the article
Plain copper is already too expensive for power lines, and this alloy is more expensive than copper alone. Transmission and distribution lines are typically made with aluminum conductors layered over a steel core for mechanical strength:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium-conductor_steel-rein...
Aluminum is a worse conductor than copper on a volumetric basis but a better conductor on a mass basis, which is important for overhead lines supporting their own weight against gravity. It also costs significantly less than copper.
Rearden metal heat exchangers, eh?
This could be useful in heat exchangers and rocket engine thrust chambers. I imagine this has very high thermal conductivity compared to steels. The thermal conductivity of copper is about 20x that of stainless steel. So, you can make the walls of the passages an order of magnitude thicker, increasing their strength proportionally.
will it make a good bicycle frame?
They mention both high temperature durability and conductivity as positives. Not really the most important qualities in a bike frame to be fair.
I doubt it beats aluminium in cost, so it would need to significantly beat carbon in performance to make it worthwhile.
For a bicycle frame, we want an alloy that is relatively light and easy to weld. At no point is weldability considered, and it is not impossible that this alloy welds very poorly (losing its properties in the area thermally affected by welding, requires a very narrow energy range to weld properly).
The advantages of this alloy do not make it a better choice than special steels or titanium alloys when it comes to metallic materials.
There are few cyclists on Venus.
Well it's on par with stainless steel strength wise while being both more expensive and heaver. Presumably also much more prone to corrosion.
If you don't mind it being heavier than a steel frame.
It would be a very expensive bicycle frame. That is for 100% certain ;)
Besides space and ~~efficient killing/murdering~~ military industries, where would this “superalloy-like” strength be useful in?
Nuclear plants?
Maybe useful in supercomputing/quantum computing?
Pressurised water reactors use Inconel tubes. Inconel 600 alloys are high-chromium nickel alloys for steam exchange tubes that are highly resistant to various forms of corrosion (capable of withstanding to 30 years in water with boric acid and 300°C+).
The design of these alloys and exchangers is extremely complex and benefits from several thousand years of operational experience. This applies to the alloys themselves, their heat treatment, shaping, interaction with other materials, ageing, etc.
It is highly unlikely that these alloys will be abandoned in the next 20-30 years.
It's difficult to predict. High performance heat exchangers are an obvious application, but the potential is great for many other things.
"Nuclear plants?"
Sure. One of the most challenging problems in a PWRs is heat exchange; the so called "steam generators" that circulate primary and secondary water, for instance. They're huge, expensive heat exchangers and their primary failure mode is cracking. A durable, high temperature, high thermal conductivity copper based alloy goes directly to this. Better thermal conductivity could make these devices substantially smaller, reducing costs in all sorts of way, or enable novel designs.
It still might be prone to fatigue cracks.
Yep. Cracking is a subtle process. This new material and the new designs based on it will be either better or worse than the nickel alloys that have been used, but only time will tell. At least an opportunity exists for improvement now.
The recuperator in Allam Cycle CO2 turbines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allam_power_cycle
Efficient and less polluting coal plants. To approach 50% or more efficiency when converting the thermal energy of coal to electricity the temperature must exceed 700C, but that brings all kind of problems as it presently requires exotic alloys.
Coal is problematic due to ash and sulfur. Natural gas-fired plants, OTOH, are not going anywhere for next few decades. And even if they go, and get replaced with nuclear or even fusion, the steam generation step does not go way anyway.
Legitimate content aside, this article is a perfect example of modern public relations writing, of flash over substance. Each paragraph is larded with PR buzzwords like "breakthrough," "cutting-edge," "groundbreaking," etc. to the degree that the topic is nearly lost in the lexical shrubbery.
And it's clear the article's author doesn't understand scientific writing. Each participant is identified as having a PhD (when true), contrary to accepted academic practice. Imagine a scientific article by Albert Einstein, tagged with "PhD" -- except that in 1905, any relevance aside, Einstein didn't have one. My point is that the participants' academic degrees are irrelevant to the science. As Richard Feynman said, "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion". Oh -- wait -- did I mention that Feynman had a PhD?
My favorite phrase from an article that tries to raise empty PR prose to an art form: "... Lehigh is the only university in the Lehigh Valley to have this designation ..." Noted. But this is like saying, "We're tops in our ZIP code!"
good take overall, though the last point is forgiven as a subtle dig at lafayette
Backup link https://web.archive.org/web/20250415035227/https://news.lehi...
"""
Unlike typical grain boundaries that migrate over time at high temperatures, this complexion acts as a structural stabilizer, maintaining the nanocrystalline structure, preventing grain growth and dramatically improving high-temperature performance.
The alloy holds its shape under extreme, long-term thermal exposure and mechanical stress, resisting deformation even near its melting point, noted Patrick Cantwell, a research scientist at Lehigh University and co-author of the study.
"""
This sounds exotic, but possibly better performing in some use cases?
I'm tired of articles with titles like "X makes Y bigger/faster/stronger," then never giving an answer to the obvious question: "How much?" This article is happy to tell you it costs $25M to develop , how many hours the annealed the metal, the patent numbers, the years the researchers got their degrees, but never once gives a single number related to the materials performance. Maybe its 0.1% better, maybe its 1000% better. I guess its not important.
There's a few numbers in the Science article, and they do actually link to it, unlike some. [0
And the intro numbers are... Exciting.
> This core-shell structure neither dissolves nor coarsens at temperatures of up to 800°C while also causing the yielding strength to be in excess of 1 gigapascal.
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr0299
In other words, it makes the copper allow much stronger than mild steels, like the stainless steels, and on par with strong (but by far not the strongest) steel alloys.
Imagine cutting stainless steel with a copper-based blade, and not the other way around.
Rearden metal...?
Not as strong as steel, real or imaginary.
Well not as strong as the best steels, but still stronger than many common steels. Even some less special bronze alloys can beat common steels in strength.
Milder steels have yield strength in the 200-300 MPa range, while this alloy reaches nearly 1000 MPa.
That's a copper-iron alloy.