13/10/2016 Impossiblealloys:Howtomakeneverbeforeseenmetals|NewScientist

FEATURE 12 October 2016

Impossible alloys: How to make never-before-

seen metals
From bronze to steel, alloys are the backbone of the modern world. Now a recipe that shouldnt work is
creating metal mixtures with totally unexpected abilities

Forging ahead
Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By James Mitchell Crow

ONE OF the oldest shipwrecks ever discovered lies off the southern coast of Turkey. First
glimpsed by a young sponge diver in 1982, it was carrying a curious cargo: 9 tonnes of copper
and 1 tonne of tin. A curious cargo, that is, unless you know the recipe for bronze. The
Uluburun wreck, named after a nearby town, dates from 1300 BC, smack in the middle of the
Bronze Age.

Today, arguably, we live in the steel age, but the principle underlying our de ning material
remains the same. You take a pure metal and enhance it by adding a pinch of another element.
One part tin to nine parts copper gives bronze; a smattering of carbon added to iron yields
steel. This is the recipe for making alloys materials whose strength, durability and
workability make them the basis of everything in the modern world from cutlery to lampposts
to bridges.

But are traditional alloys the best we can do? Increasingly, metallurgists are questioning this
received wisdom. By ripping up the millennia-old rulebook, they are making wild metallic
mixtures where no single element dominates, and with it producing materials the likes of

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230950500amixeduprecipeisredefiningmetalsintoimpossiblealloys/ 1/4
13/10/2016 Impossiblealloys:Howtomakeneverbeforeseenmetals|NewScientist

The Uluburun wreck carried a precious cargo of bronze

Borut Furlan/Getty

Strength and durability

Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos

which we have never seen. With applications from nuclear fusion reactors to jet engines to
basic chemistry and more, its a rich new material seam to mine and weve only just begun to
scratch the surface.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230950500amixeduprecipeisredefiningmetalsintoimpossiblealloys/ 2/4
13/10/2016 Impossiblealloys:Howtomakeneverbeforeseenmetals|NewScientist

From jet engines (above), to fusion reactors (below), better alloys mean smarter technology
Luke Duggleby/Redux / eye ...

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