Metallurgy for Cyclists The Final Chapter

by Scot Nicol

The end is nigh. This is the seventh and final part of our six-part series on metallurgy as applied to bicycles; obviously, we've extended the series, but this is the final installment - I promise. In this finale, we'll finish detailing exotic material, and then give you a mystery material on which to chew (cerebrally, that is).

Aluminum Lithium
I can see the ad guys go crazy with this one: "Cure for manic depression! Try the new lithium bike! Feeling psychotic? Lick the top tube!" That's right, lithium, as in the drug used to treat manic-depressive psychosis, is also used to enhance the mechanical properties of aluminum alloys. Actually, the lithium used as a drug is lithium carbonate, a derivative of metallic lithium.A look at "the numbers" for lithium aluminum alloys reveals some extremely impressive claims - among them high strength and stiffness. So why don't we see any lithium bikes out there? My attempts to find out more about alloys with lithium were met with lots of secrecy, misinformation and contradiction. It turns out that lithium aluminum alloys have been around for many years, but not much has made it into bike tubing - or many commercial applications at all, for that matter.
For those who have to work with lithium in its metallic form, it's more likely to cause manic-depression than it is to cure it. You see, lithium is a pain to work with. Lithium and aluminum together have even more pitfalls. Minute amounts of lithium can cause contamination in a processing facility. Lithium is unstable ... and it loves oxygen. So you need to extrude it more slowly, and heat treat it longer.
The heat treating is critical ... and easy to screw up. If you heat treat for too long, or at too high a heat - even by a small amount - the lithium can oxidize; then you're left with a soft, almost pure aluminum. Since the alloys have only about one or two percent lithium in them, it doesn't take much to make all the lithium go away. And the processing requirements and potential problems for lithium all mean one thing: expensive.
Although we can't use pure lithium to make a bike frame, check out how it compares with other metals. Lithium is number three on the periodic chart; it's the lightest of all metals; and far less dense than beryllium. Beryllium and magnesium have two thirds the density of aluminum, which is two thirds the density of titanium, which is half the density of steel. Wow, that's a lot of fractions (they're approximate, but close). You can see why these materials are enticing.
One thing you need to be aware of with lithium's numbers is that you may be seeing it in a T-8 condition. That's fine and dandy if you're making a hockey stick or baseball bat that doesn't get welded, but if you're using it to build a bike, it won't be in a T-8 (heat-treated, aged and work-hardened) condition anymore. When you look at more realistic conditions, like T-6, the strength numbers then come back down to earth.
There is excellent potential for this material, but based on my research for this article, there seem to be some processing problems to overcome. One question is, "Can you get hold of it?" If the answer is yes, then you need to ask the next question, "Can you manufacture it?" I'm still waiting for two consecutive "yes" answers.

Boron Carbide and Silicon Carbide
Other materials that get thrown into the aluminum vat to make a metal matrix composite are boron carbide (B4C), which is what the Boralyn material has in it, and silicon carbide (Si4C). When you add these materials to aluminum, you get some excellent theoretical enhancements. But the processing these materials require has some pitfalls. Silicon carbide is quite reactive and can break down in the weld zone. When molten, some of the silicon carbide can react and form aluminum carbide. Aluminum carbide is weak in strength and reactive - so reactive, in fact, that it dissolves in water. (Not a good thing for a weld to do, the last time I checked.) This kind of reaction with silicon carbide occurs due to poor welding technique; but that can cause trouble with the aluminum oxide MMCs as well, though to a lesser degree. For obvious reasons, silicon carbide hasn't seen much use in bicycle applications, though its mechanical properties make it look tempting.
Boron carbide is the material used in Boralyn, and other boron carbide-enhanced aluminum alloys are one their way; several are currently being tested by different manufacturers. You may not see them until 1995, but there's a good chance that they'll be out there. Pacific Metal Craft is producing an alloy they call B4C, and if that company's claims are true, this is a promising alloy. By putting 15 percent boron carbide in a 6013 base alloy, PMC claims yield numbers of 52-56 KSI, ultimate in the 65-72 KSI range, with a modulus of 14-15 MSI (high for an aluminum material) and an elongation of 4.5-6 percent. The 6013 alloy is a high-strength alloy with good fracture toughness (for an aluminum). When you add ceramic (B4C), the fracture toughness diminishes.
One of this alloy's benefits is that working with it is supposed to be easy. But keep in mind that all boron carbide is not created equal, nor are base alloys, so we haven't heard the final word on this material.

Beryllium
You may find this hard to believe, but there is a metal out there that is significantly more expensive than titanium. It's called beryllium. Beryllium has about two-thirds the density of aluminum, so it certainly fits into the category of non- density-challenged metals. Furthermore, beryllium has some amazing mechanical properties - and density is only one of them.The specific strength (strength divided by density) of beryllium is very high. The specific stiffness (modulus divided by density) is the highest of any metal on the face of the earth ... or within the earth for that matter. But beryllium is rare: Its concentration in the earth's crust is approximately 6 ppm. No rich deposits exist, and one of the results of this low concentration is the aforementioned high cost - compared to aluminum, it's about 200 times as expensive!
Here are some of the specific numbers for a tube of extruded beryllium: 40 KSI ultimate and 44 MSI modulus - which when combined with the low density, gives you the phenomenal specific stiffness numbers ... many times higher than any other metal. By comparison, the modulus of steel is only about 30 MSI, and the density of steel is nearly five times that of beryllium.
Had enough good news? The bad news is the horrendous elongation number of about 2 percent in the longitudinal direction, and 0.2 percent in the transverse direction. On planets where the surface temperature might be about 390 degrees F, the elongation number for beryllium goes way up, to 23 percent. Unfortunately, that doesn't do us much good here on earth. (An interesting note that appeared next to the elongation number in one mechanical engineering handbook was "Ductility values in practice will be found in general to be much lower, and essentially zero in the transverse direction." Ouch!)
Fortunately, there is an alternative to extruded beryllium: It's called cross-rolled sheet. The beryllium bike that Brush-Wellman (a vertically integrated beryllium company) made for American Bicycle Manufacturing a couple of years ago was fabricated from sheet, to take advantage of higher elongation (more than 10 percent) and higher ultimate and tensile strength. To make the bike, the sheet was rolled into tubes and welded together.
In further bad news, beryllium wins out over all metals on the toxicity issue - beryllium dust can kill you. Inhalation of dust particles or vapors containing beryllium may cause berylliosis, an inflammation of the lungs.
Due to cost, ductility and toxicity constraints, pure beryllium isn't commercially feasible for bicycle frames. Sure, you can make one, like that $25,000 showpiece that ABM did, but you can't call that project commercially feasible.
Brush-Wellman also has created an aluminum-based alloy with beryllium added to the mix. The patented metal is trademarked as AlBeMet, and it shows some promise for bicycle parts. The material is already being sold commercially in other markets - for computer disk drives, for instance - and Beyond Fabrications of San José, California, has seatposts and handlebars made out of it. Frames are on the way, according to a spokesman for Brush-Wellman. Altogether, the company has four alloys of AlBeMet, and they vary from 30 to 62 percent beryllium in the mix, with the following claimed mechanical properties:
AlBeMet Alloy:
130
140
150
162
% Beryllium
30
40
50
62
Density
.086
.082
.080
.076
Yield (KSI)
23
30
33
40
Ultimate (KS)
34
40
50
55
Elongation (%)
17
15
13
7
Modulus (MSI)
19
20
25
28
Brush claims that these alloys are weldable. It's interesting to note that strength is quite low for the materials with less than 50 percent beryllium.A final practical use for beryllium is as a neutron source to charge the initiator in atomic bombs. When bombarded with alpha radiation, beryllium emits neutrons. Thanks to beryllium, that's how the neutron was discovered back in 1932.

AerMet 100
AerMet 100 is a promising material that's been raising eyebrows in the bike industry lately. This new ferrous alloy (steel) was patented in 1992 by Ray Hemphill and Dave Wert of the Carpenter Technology Corporation, and there are now several framebuilders fiddling around with this alloy.
Check out AerMet 100's amazing numbers. The density, at 0.285 pounds per cubic inch, is virtually identical to cro-moly steel. Indeed, if you look at the make-up of AerMet, there's a large percentage of nickel and cobalt, which have slightly higher density than iron. Where this material really blows away the other weldable steel alloys (and all other bicycle fabricating materials) is in strength, though. Our December 13, 1993 VeloNews tubing test included samples provided by Carpenter and showed that AerMet 100 had a yield strength more than 261 KSI, and ultimate strength over 300 KSI. Humm baby!
Combine that with good elongation - the same test revealed 10 percent elongation - and a modulus typical of steels at 28 MSI. Carpenter claims that "the alloy is designed for components requiring high strength, high fracture-toughness, and exceptional resistance to stress corrosion cracking and fatigue."
So what's wrong with this picture? Nothing is wrong, but there are a few hurdles. As you can imagine, AerMet is expensive, but still only about a half to two-thirds the price of titanium. It's not available tapered or butted (not yet anyway - both of those processes are currently being worked on). So far, the manufacturer has been successful in swaging stays, and these should be commercially available soon. In the meantime, you can weld or braze AerMet to 4130 cro-moly - so tapered stays, braze-ons, dropouts, and all of the usual accouterments can be added easily.
On the negative side, I'll make the same claim that I made for steel: AerMet 100 is density challenged. Even so, extremely light frames can be made with this material and have sufficient strength. The biggest obstacle I can see is the old buckling problem, the beer-can effect. To get those frame weights down to the two-pound area, which I consider the next weight milestone in frame fabrication, it's going to take some work. On the other hand, it looks like it will be easy to build an extremely durable three-pound frame. Several framebuilders - including Kellogg, Davidson, Curve and Arrow - are already producing AerMet 100 frames.

And Now for a Mystery Metal...
Gary Helfrich recently told me about a wonderful new material that has some unreal mechanical properties. His claims:
Density: 0.084 KSI, 15 percent less than aluminum (wow!)
Yield strength: 510 KSI, 12 times that of aluminum, double that of AerMet 100 (triple wow!)
Modulus: 18 MSI, 80 percent higher than aluminum (wow again!)
Strength-to-weight ratio 14 times that of aluminum (wow to the fourth!).
If you use 1.25 x 0.030-inch top and seat tubes, and a 1.375 x 0.033-inch down tube to mimic the sweet ride of titanium, when you compare modulus figures, what do you get? Frame weight of 1.3 pounds!
What's wrong with this picture? Here comes that pesky elongation, again, rearing its ugly head. Although it's as good as a carbon-fiber filament, it's barely above zippo percent.
The material? Monocrystalline silicon, the material used to make the chips in the computer that this document was typed on.

Don't be Fooled
I have two simple thoughts to leave with you at the conclusion of this series. When assessing the materials used in bicycle design: 1) look at the whole picture; and 2) remember that bicycle design is probably the subject for a 14-part series - put the material where you need it.

Metallurgy for Cyclists Try Something Exotic

by Scot Nicol

You probably thought that with this installment - part six of our six- part series on bicycle metallurgy - we'd be done with the subject. You were wrong, and you should know me better than that by now. I've added a seventh part, because there is too much remaining to discuss. And because I'm having too much fun doing it....
This time we'll start to talk about exotics: those materials that we didn't include in our coverage of aluminum, steel, titanium and carbon-fiber composites. The final episode of our series will have more about these exotics, plus a wrap-up and maybe even a quiz: I'll present you with some materials that have fantastic "numbers," and you can try to determine what they are, and why they would stink as a bicycle material.

Thermoplastic Composites
The previous installment of this series covered the subject of carbon-fiber composites (it's not a metal, but we explained that last time). What wasn't mentioned or covered - on purpose, I didn't want to confuse the issue - was the distinction between thermoset and thermoplastic composites. The carbon-fiber composite bikes that you're used to seeing are of the thermoset variety. A newcomer on the scene is thermoplastic composite. The difference between how the two are fabricated is analogous to the difference between bread and chocolate.
The process of making a structure out of thermoset composite goes something like this (breadmaking procedure in parentheses). You mix up some ingredients (flour, water, yeast); put them in a mold (bread pan); apply heat (oven); and a chemical reaction occurs (yeast reacting).Voilà, Wonderbread. There's no turning back from this point. You can't re-melt the bread and start over.
Thermoplastic composite construction involves mixing ingredients, then heating them up until they go through a phase change (that is, melt). To get your frame, make sure that the material freezes into the shape you want, but if it doesn't, you can actually re-melt and re-mold it. (The number of times you can do this without property degradation depends on the material you're using.) And apparently - unlike the outgassing characteristic of the themoset process - you won't get much smell when this melting process happens. The material is also supposedly capable of being recycled, both by remolding or grinding and putting into a new mixture. So, because of its ability to be reformed and recycled, and the claim that is doesn't emit nasty smells, some people are calling it a green material.
The only incarnation of this technology in our industry that I am aware of is the Yeti bike, made in conjunction with Kaiser Aerospace and Penske.A very important attribute of the thermoplastic materials is that the impact resistance is much better than with thermoset materials. Epoxy is a relatively brittle material, and brittle is not your friend in a bicycle. A negative attribute of thermoplastic is that it is hard to bond anything to it. Given the past history of composite structures, and the quantities of little bits that you need to bond to bicycle frames, this can be a formidable hurdle.

Magnesium
Imagine a metal with half the density of aluminum, strength better than 6061, and elongation around 10 to 11 percent. I'm describing a magnesium alloy here, currently being tested by Easton. While magnesium is not normally known for its ductility, Easton says the material looks promising with those 10 to 11 percent elongation numbers. Although the modulus is low, in the range of 6MSI, that really shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. Aluminum has a relatively low modulus, but it doesn't mean an aluminum frame can't be built stiff. The same will hold true for magnesium, in fact a lower modulus would be welcome in the eyes of many.
One issue that needs to be addressed with this metal is the extreme problem with corrosion. Leave a magnesium part out in the rain and it will disappear faster than just about anything except unpainted steel. This problem can be overcome with proper surface treatment, like painting or anodization.
One of the intangible benefits of magnesium is that if you need to start a fire for some reason, just scrape some flakes off your dropouts, and light them up. They'll easily burn. For the mini- Hindenburg effect, just add water. The oxygen and hydrogen in the water disassociate, and party down with help from the magnesium. By the way, titanium does the same thing, but it's a little harder to get it started.

Aluminum Metal-Matrix Composites
I'm sure you've heard of aluminum MMC's. Specialized has marketed its M2 line of bikes featuring Duralcan MMC tubing for several years now. The Duralcan material is an alloy of aluminum (for bike-industry purposes manufacturers use either 6061 or 7005 base material) combined with a ceramic material; in the case of the M2 it's aluminum oxide (Al2O3). Duralcan has a patented process by which it adds the Al2O3 while the aluminum is molten and in a vacuum.
The benefits of the process are apparently numerous, but for we tight-wad bikies, the big advantage is that it's a cheap way to produce this material. If aluminum oxide sounds familiar to you, it might be because you've sanded something with Al2O3 sandpaper in the past. If so, you've used essentially the same stuff that goes in these tubes: 600 grit aluminum oxide. That's right, sandpaper. Different percentages of Al2O3 yield different results. The M2 bikes have about 10 percent Al2O3 (by weight) in their mix. Which means they're 90-percent aluminum. Changing the volume fraction of the ceramic allows you to adjust the mechanical properties. Add more Al2O3 and stiffness goes up, but elongation and fracture toughness suffer. With a 10-percent mix, the material has about 8-percent higher yield strength, and 20-percent greater stiffness. The trade-off is that the elongation will be reduced, but to a claimed value of approximately 10 percent, which is acceptable.
Aluminum bikes are stiff enough, you say. True, but as you also know, this is a function of individual design. Suppose you are designing the rear end of a bike, and you want a certain level of stiffness, and you also want plenty of clearance for mud, heels, tires and chainrings. Smaller diameter tubes make it easier to accomplish this, and if you want the stiffness with smaller tubes, you benefit from having a higher modulus. With higher modulus material, you can also reduce the size of your main frame tubes so they don't resemble giant sausages.
The tangible benefit in being able to change the modulus of the different tubes for different applications is that where stiffness is more important, you can have that. Where you're more concerned about the ductility issue, as around the head tube junctions, you can enhance that property. These relatively small but important advances are great examples of what will continue to drive the evolution of bicycle frames.
Heat treatment is performed virtually the same as with a 6061 alloy. If you don't want to or can't heat treat, 7005 is also used for MMCs. Although it hasn't seen much commercial use yet, I'm sure by the time the 1995 models hit the tradeshow floors, you'll see them. The strength numbers don't really change over a standard 7005 alloy, but you can get those increases in modulus mentioned previously.
I've refrained from getting into the huge subject of MMCs that aren't weldable, but exhibit excellent mechanical properties. These are viable for bicycle use, but the designer is required to use lugs, or some other method of tube joining.
Overall, when you look at the aluminum oxide MMCs, there isn't any earth-shattering news. There are some minor enhancements to the mechanical properties, and some drawbacks. What matters most, as I've pointed out numerous times in this series, is intelligent design of the entire structure. Had enough for one column, yet? For the final installment, I'll take a look at three other aluminum MMCs, do an overview of beryllium and AerMet 100, throw in a mystery metal, and provide that long-awaited wrap-up.

Metallurgy for Cyclists Carbon Fiber Boasts Tremendous Potential

by scot nicol

If you've followed parts one through four of this series on bicycle metallurgy, you've learned a lot about the physical characteristics that are important to consider when designing aluminum, titanium or steel bicycle frames. This installment takes a step outside the realm of metallurgy, and looks at the use of carbon-fiber composites in bicycle frame applications.

The Wonderful World of Composites
It's common to use the terms carbon fiber and composite interchangeably, even though all composites are not carbon fiber. For example, both plywood and concrete are composite materials. The term composite refers to combinations of materials that result in enhanced properties not provided by the materials alone (concrete is a composite of cement, sand, gravel and water; Cheeze Whiz is air, artificial flavors and artificial colors).
In scientific terms, composites are generally acknowledged as those materials in which either particles, short fibers or long fibers are dispersed in a matrix. In the case of the Duralcan metal matrix composite that is found in the Specialized M2, aluminum oxide whiskers are dispersed in a 6061 aluminum matrix; while advanced composites - the types used to build bicycles - have continuous fibers embedded into a matrix (typically epoxy).To qualify as an advanced composite, it is generally thought that the fibers are continuous, greater than 50-percent fibers by volume, and the fiber has mechanical properties superior to fiberglass. Fibers can be carbon, Kevlar (a.k.a. aramid), boron, ceramic, silicon carbide, quartz, polyethylene ... and probably others that I'm not aware of.

A Simple Lexicon
Here's a simplified explanation of how terms will be used. A fiber is a single strand of reinforcing material. A bundle of parallel continuous fibers are bound together with a glue, or matrix. A single layer of this matrix is called a ply, and multiple plies are laid up to form a laminate. The plies can be laid up in various angles to produce different characteristics of the laminate. If you've forgotten about the other terms used in this series - like tensile strength and elongation - re-read the first installment of this series to reacquaint yourself with those terms, because they'll be essential to our discussion.

The Numbers Look Good
If you look at the numbers that carbon fiber can boast, your initial thought might be that it's crazy to build a bike out of anything else. But you astute students of the School of Bicycle Geekdom already know that numbers are not the only thing to look at - you need to check out the fine print. And get this: With carbon fiber, you need to throw most of what you've learned out the window.
Yes, it's true that the potential for composite frame materials is tremendous. Unfortunately, the results of some composite bicycle-frame projects have been less than satisfactory. There are reasons for the high failure rate that composite frames have endured, but the fault is not that of the material. I know you may find this hard to believe, but sometimes even rocket scientists make mistakes. The situation is similar to what happened with titanium in the 1970s. Teledyne made some frames that failed, not because the material was bad, but because the design was bad, or the execution of the design was bad. Similar things have happened with composites, and the image of the material is not as good as it should be.
The common folly is for the designer to underestimate the complexity of the bicycle frame. Since carbon-fiber structures are not very fault tolerant (unlike metal structures), the design and execution plays an even more important role. And sometimes the fault is not in the design or execution of the structure - the fault may be a big rock coming in contact with the downtube. While the tube might not fail from such a large impact, the repercussions are usually hidden on the inside of the laminate, or within the laminate. Microcracks can then spread through the matrix, decreasing the ability of the fiber to transfer load. Metal tends to do a bit better in these situations - but you can make metal frames that break without warning, too.

It's All in the Lay-Up
What I'm getting at is the fact that composite materials are very complex ... more complex than metals. In addition to the material itself having greater complexity, the structures are not as straightforward as metal structures. As you have learned in this series, the designer of a metal structure has two variables: material choice and geometric configuration (like tube sizes, shapes and thicknesses). Those wacky composite guys not only get those same two variables, they also get to determine how the composite matrix is laid up. Bear in mind that two structures of identical geometric configuration, weight and composite material, but with different lay-up, could yield a completely different result. Not only is it possible for the obvious - like stiffness - to vary, but fracture stresses and failure modes could also vary tremendously. And the failure modes of composite structures are plentiful: exploding laminate, fibers pulling free from a matrix, first-ply-failure, matrix cracking, and delamination. And I thought designing a metal bike was tough....
Another curve ball thrown into the mix is the geometric shape of the frame. Sure you can make a frame with tubes and lugs like Trek or Giant, but you can also lay them in a shape of your own design, like Kestrel or Look. With lugs and tubes, the designer at least has metal frames with which to compare; but with a new shape, a whole new set of equations needs to be developed.

Tensile and Compressive Strength
Let's take a look at the physical properties that have been examined with aluminum, titanium and steel frames, and see where carbon fits in (or doesn't fit in). The way strength is measured in the laboratory is by a tensile test. In a tensile test, we use tension to pull a sample apart until it breaks. Imagine we're pulling on a bundle of carbon fibers, doing a tensile test. It performs very well in a tensile test - actually, it performs extremely well.
But what about the compressive behavior of carbon? Not too good by itself, kind of like a bowl of spaghetti. You need some kind of adhesive to bond the fibers together, and give the material compressive as well as tensile strength. The matrix connects this whole disorganized mess of fibers by transferring the load between the fibers and between the plies. Since the matrix and the fiber combine to make up the composite, we'll look at them together to give comparative results.

Density and Modulus
At the risk of being accused of comparing apples and oranges, I'm going to give you some guidelines for a generic carbon fiber lay-up. Bear in mind that there are many different ways to look at this, and I'm only making a comparison for the sake of continuity in the series. The density of your laminate is in the neighborhood of 0.056 pounds per square foot, which is about 60 percent of the weight of aluminum, our previous lightweight winner. The modulus of a generic not-very-high-zoot carbon fiber is about 30 to 33 MSI, or about 10 percent higher than that of steel, previously the stiffest of the three materials we've looked at. So you can see we've got some stiff, light stuff here.
When we throw the epoxy into the mix, things start to get interesting. A well-made laminate will have 62- to 65-percent fibers by volume. The Rule of Mixtures says that the modulus is proportional to the percentage of fiber in the matrix, since virtually all of the resulting mechanical properties come from the fiber. In other words, the matrix transfers the load to the fibers. So if we start with 30 MSI modulus, with only 65 percent of the matrix contributing, we end up at about two thirds of that, or 18 to 21 MSI for our modulus. Still not too shabby: density one third of titanium, and modulus about 25 percent higher.
This modulus measurement is only in the zero-degree direction though (that's the direction parallel to the fiber in the ply), and as we know, bicycles get varying stresses applied from varying directions. That matrix does a good job of holding together those fibers, so they don't buckle under the combined loading. Let's rotate the ply so that the modulus is measured perpendicular to the lay-up of the fibers. Now our modulus reads a pathetic 1.5 MSI or so, essentially giving us the modulus reading of the epoxy. Yuk! What's worse, the modulus drops off precipitously between zero and 30 degrees, giving low results almost all the way to 90 degrees. This matters because bicycle tubes (or structures) are subjected to torsional loads as well as longitudinal ones. What's the answer? Add layers of plies that are at different angles (often 45 degrees) to the initial zero-degree layer. The result is an overall modulus of approximately 10 to 14 MSI, still not too shabby. Again, these are generic numbers for the sake of a simplistic comparison.
What is extremely cool about the ability to lay-up a laminate, is that you can dictate the exact characteristics you want your tube or structure to have. Stiff in torsion, soft in bending. Soft in both, stiff in both. You determine the characteristics - the material doesn't dictate them. This phenomenon is called anisotropy, and you just can't do it with metal.

The Weak Link - Elongation
Now for the bad news: carbon's weak link is elongation. Elongation is your safety net, but with carbon it's low, low, low. Depending on lay-up, it's possible to get some elongation out of carbon. For example, there is a scissoring of layers in the 45-degree plies, but in general we're dealing with a material that doesn't have an overabundance of ductility. Composite designs are not meant to permanently bend. And when they fail, they fail all at once, so designers build in a big safety net. This is similar to what the aluminum designers do, in order to overcome the low elongation of that material.Most manufacturers are very secretive about their lay-ups, so getting good info isn't always easy. Reading through the Trek technical manual yields numbers for the specific modulus of that company's lay-up, which measures the modulus divided by the density. Backing these numbers out yields an 8 MSI modulus for the Trek OCLV lay-up.
The strength of the advanced composites is very high. The zero-degree strength for even a standard carbon unitape (the building block of the laminate) is 300 KSI or better. Looking at the big picture, the strength of the laminate still ends up way above 100 KSI, and this is at very low density. Trek's specific strength numbers yield actual ultimate values of about 115 KSI. Take a look at the 8 MSI modulus and 115 KSI strength that Trek claims for its laminate, and compare to aluminum. The carbon has about 20 percent lower stiffness, but is 40 percent lighter, and the strength is roughly double, while still being 40 percent lighter. Very impressive numbers.

A Brilliant Future
What's the future of advanced composites? Their reputation is definitely on the rise. These days, most of the hideously ugly carbon projects have gone away, and there are several very successful carbon production lines happening. The two biggest players at this point are most likely Trek with its OCLV bikes, and Giant, which markets its bikes under several different brand names as well as its own. My guess, after polling a few people in the industry, is that there are probably two to three times as many carbon-fiber bikes sold in the world today as there are titanium bikes. Surprising perhaps, when you consider all the hype that titanium has received. But when you look at how inexpensive a frame from Trek or Giant is, this starts to make sense.
The future of composite bikes will likely parallel my prediction for aluminum rigs - that the material advances will be a lot less significant than our process and execution of making these promising materials work to their best advantage.
Steve Levin, the engineering manager of Schwinn, gave Scot Nicol considerable input for this article. Thanks, Steve.
Next time: the whopping subject of exotic materials.

Metallurgy for Cyclists the Titanium Advantage

by scot nicol

The Titanium Development Association calls titanium "the material of choice," and there are a lot of people in the bike industry who would agree. This, the fourth part of our metallurgy series, is about that mysterious and expensive metal, titanium. Its reputation within the industry is excellent: light weight, super strength and fatigue life, a magical ride ... and a heavy price tag, to boot. So let's find out what the physical characteristics are that give titanium such an enviable reputation.
Titanium is not as rare as you might guess - it's actually the fourth most abundant metallic element in the earth, after aluminum, magnesium and iron. In fact, there's a lot more titanium in the earth's crust than there is chromium or molybdenum, two of the essential ingredients that accompany the iron used for steel bike tubing.

Density and Other Properties
As we learned last time, density is the giant feather in the property cap for aluminum. This is an area where titanium also shines, and although its density is almost double that of aluminum, it's only 56 percent as dense as steel.
Our second property is stiffness, or Young's modulus (E). The titanium that you find used in a majority of bicycle frames has an E of around 15 million pounds per square inch - approximately half that of steel. This means that steel and titanium are roughly comparable when it comes to the stiffness-to-weight ratio. Previously, we learned that the stiffness of a frame depends on design and the properties of the material used. The same goes for titanium - you can provide a flexible or a stiff ride, depending on execution. Because of the relationship between titanium's high strength, low density and moderate modulus, most fabricators choose tube diameters that provide a supple, shock-absorbing ride. To push titanium down into the realm of the super light, the modulus becomes a problem, because then the frame gets too flexible. In this case, I'm talking about frames that weigh in the neighborhood of two pounds. Building ultra-light frames is not an easy task in any material ... including titanium.

Ti's Real Plus: Elongation and Tensile Strength
So titanium gets two second-place marks as compared to steel and aluminum in the first two properties we examined. But when we look at property No. 3, elongation, titanium is miles ahead of either material. This is the property that tells you how far something will bend before it breaks, a kind of safety factor for framebuilders.
Elongation numbers for titanium are often 20 to 30 percent. For comparison, typical steels can be 10 to 15 percent - the higher strength steels go down as low as 6 percent. Aluminum typically runs in the 6 to 12 percent range. Higher strength aluminums again creep into the low range of single digits, with warning bells ringing loudly. Things without much elongation are said to be brittle. Brittle frame failure is not a good thing.
The tensile strength of titanium is also excellent. The cold-worked-stress-relieved yield strength (see "Touring the Ancotech mill" to find out more on CWSR) of the 3/2.5 alloy (that's the alloy usually found in bicycle frames) is typically 100-130 KSI or more. This compares favorably with many steels we find in bicycles. Remember, too, this is achieved with fantastic elongation numbers, and at almost half the weight. And we haven't even talked about fracture toughness and endurance limit yet.

Fatigue Strength
The fatigue strength is another property where titanium performs beautifully (By now, you may be asking: "Is he ever going to say anything bad about titanium?" ). As explained in the previous installments, there is not a definitive measurement of fatigue strength that will tell us how the material will last in a bicycle frame. Bicycles are subjected to forces of varying amounts in a random, cyclic fashion. As long as these loads are kept below a certain level, titanium and steel both have thresholds below which they will never fail. Almost none of the aluminum (including the metal matrix composites), magnesium and beryllium used in bicycle fabrication has a defined endurance limit, so you need to design around it, as was explained last time.

Now for the Bad News....
The negative sides of titanium are several, and they will keep titanium from becoming ubiquitous in the market. First, it's expensive. Not only is the cost of energy used to extract the metal costly, but the processing requirements are cost intensive as well.
The other problems have to do with fabrication. You've certainly heard that titanium is hard to weld and machine. A more accurate statement is that it is different to weld or machine. What you can't do is cut corners with titanium. Meticulous procedure is essential. Without it, you risk contaminated welds, which can result in catastrophic failure of the weld.
At the recent Cactus Cup race, I came around a corner on the course to find a guy with a titanium bike that had a freshly severed head tube. A quick inspection revealed my suspicion: a contaminated weld. Machining titanium is either a dream or a nightmare, depending on your procedure. If you use the proper speeds and feeds, and the right cutting tools, it will machine beautifully.
If steel is "density challenged" and aluminum is "strength challenged," then what challenges face titanium? Modulus is the biggie. Even if we start building our bikes out of higher strength titanium like 6/4, the modulus will stay the same. As the walls get thinner and the diameters larger, stiffness goes up and weight goes down - but to enter the next generation of reduced-weight framesets using conventional tubes and methods, the walls will be so thin that buckling will be a problem. There are ways around the buckling, however. Several manufacturers already have titanium bikes that have internally butted, externally butted, formed or swaged tubes, or some combination thereof. Watch for more development in this area as a way to continue exploring the limits of lightweight, strong frame design with adequate stiffness.
Will titanium be considered the material of choice in the future? Its position and reputation as a magical metal probably won't be seriously challenged for a while. But even so, look for some action from the aluminum fabricators, who are evolving their craft, and whose frames will get stronger, cheaper and lighter, giving the customer an excellent value. The titanium guys won't stand idly by and just watch this happen, though. Litespeed is already pushing the price envelope to new lows with excellent road and mountain-bike frames in the $1000 range. Although the extremely low-price barrier probably won't be broken, continuous improvements in tube forming and fabrication techniques will keep titanium's demand and reputation strong.
In the next issue, the "Heady Metal" series covers a non-metal, carbon fiber.

Metallurgy for Cyclists Aluminium's Future is Bright and Shiny

by scot nicol

Good morning ... afternoon ... evening (circle one), class. Today, we are going to study aluminum. What we learn today will be based on the knowledge you've already gained during our two previous sessions. Did you all get a chance to review the first lesson - an overview? How about the second, on steel? Good. This one on aluminum marks the halfway point of our six-part series.
Aluminum as a frame material has increased dramatically in popularity over the last decade. In the early 1980s, aluminum bikes were a novelty, only available from a small, select group of high-end manufacturers. Then, in 1982, Cannondale jumped on the scene and began to push the material downmarket. Today, almost every medium-to-large manufacturer has at least one aluminum bike.
Furthermore, there's plenty of material for them to use - aluminum is the most plentiful metal in the earth's crust. And except for magnesium and beryllium, it's also the lightest structural metal. A primary source of aluminum is the ore bauxite, named for the town where it was first discovered - Les-Baux-de-Provence, in France. The ore contains hydrated alumina (Al2O3*2 H2O) with impurities of iron and titanium oxides. Sounds like one-stop shopping for the bike industry's metal requirements, eh? It's not really, as we have better sources of titanium and iron ore.

Making Aluminum into Tubing
The actual process that changes the aluminum we find in the earth's crust into a tube suitable for building a bike or lawn chair is complex, ugly and energy-intensive. It's appropriate that the most important process for getting from bauxite to aluminum is called the Bayer method, because studying it will give you a headache.... It takes about 9 kilowatts of energy to produce a pound of aluminum - far above what's required for steel. And although the production of recycled aluminum takes less than 5 percent of that amount of energy, virgin aluminum is needed to make wrought products - those that are rolled, extruded, or drawn.
A number of different alloys are produced using raw aluminum. For bicycle fabrication, the resultant wrought aluminum products commonly use a four-number designation system. An example of this would be the venerable 6061 alloy. (See "Aluminum alloys" for other examples.) Cast aluminum alloys use a three-number tag, a period, then a fourth number. Both wrought and cast alloys use another number that comes at the end: the temper designation. No doubt you've seen the T4 or T6 condition listed after some of the alloys: 7075 T6 or 2024 T4, for example. It describes what cold work, heat treatment and aging processes (if any) the material has been subjected to.
The tempering has a huge effect on the mechanical properties of many alloys of aluminum (some alloys are, and some aren't, heat treatable). When you weld a 6061 downtube to a 6061 head tube on a bicycle frame, the as-welded condition will have lower strength than before it was welded. You then need to solution heat treat, and artificially age the frame, to return it to high strength. This goes for the Duralcan material used in the Specialized M2 bikes, too, as the base alloy is 6061, with about 10 percent aluminum oxide by volume. And although 7005 alloys, like the Easton Varilite, don't need to be heat treated after welding, they do need to be artificially aged. When you age and heat treat, you're mucking around with solid solutions; crystalline structures; the saturation of alloying constituents; their subsequent submicroscopic precipitation; and a bunch of other very small, but very significant changes that I'm not going to discuss.
Alloys that aren't heat-treatable are often strengthened by cold work - also known as strain hardening, or work hardening. Rather than change the structure by recrystalizing it, cold working changes the structure through brute force, such as rolling, drawing, straightening or flattening the material. Examples of this type of alloy are the 5086 and 5083 alloys that currently are seeing some use in bicycle frames.
Note that when you heat treat - which really should be called thermal treatment - there are two different steps. The first is the solution heat treatment, which is usually done between 800 and 1000 degrees Fahrenheit for a number of hours. The aluminum is then quenched - in air or water, depending on the alloy - to room temperature. After that, the aluminum must be precipitation hardened (also known as aging).
The alloying elements that went into solution during the heat treatment will precipitate out over time, increasing the strength of the aluminum. Since the alloying elements are more soluble at elevated temperatures, aging is usually done in an oven (bake at 250 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, for eight to 36 hours), so that the process happens more quickly. This is the process you hear about called artificial aging.

Aluminum's Properties
The first property of aluminum that we'll examine is the easiest to understand, and happens to be the one that makes aluminum so desirable as a frame material. It's called density. Aluminum, as you know already, has approximately one-third the density of steel and one-half that of titanium. Since our industry is so weight-saving conscious, aluminum has become a very important player. In fact, the more I learn about materials, the brighter the future looks for aluminum.
Consider that some of the new aluminum composites have strengths close to or matching that of CrMo, with one-third the density. But, as you good students know, we need to look at many things in combination with strength and density, so let's do it. Even though the modulus numbers for aluminum are low compared to other common framebuilding materials, you are able to build a plenty stiff bike with it, because the low density allows you to build a bike with large-diameter tubes, without a weight penalty.
As you'll remember from the last installment of this series, build a bike with large-diameter tubes, and the stiffness increases dramatically. And since the density is low, the walls can be thick enough to provide good buckle-resistance along with the stiffness. How stiff a frame rides is a function of its design. Alans and Cannondales are both made of aluminum, but nobody - at least not correctly - ever called an Alan stiff, nor a Cannondale flexible.The first big property challenge for aluminum is elongation. How far will aluminum bend before it breaks? Not nearly as far as titanium, and usually not approaching the limits of steel, either. If you've learned anything from this series, though, it's that you have to look at a combination of factors before making a judgment.
It's true that low elongation increases the risk of a brittle frame failure, and elongations below about 9 percent should get close scrutiny. But we need to look at strength, toughness, and the endurance limit, too.
What we find is that aluminum (except for a couple of exceptions like the 5086 alloy) doesn't have an endurance limit. That means that even a minuscule load, if applied enough times, will eventually result in a fatigue failure. Kinda scary, don't you think? Steel and titanium are fine in this department, aluminum is not. Clearly, there are a lot of aluminum bikes out there. Are they all going to break? No, they're not.
How do you design around this? I posed the question to "Sir" Charles Teixeira, the Easton engineer who is responsible for the Varilite tubeset (I added the "Sir" part, we'll call him Chuck). Chuck Teixeira is a smart guy, and he knows materials. When he designs things, he pays attention to a few simple rules: One of them is to put the material where you need it. This is a very simple concept, but one that people seem to easily loose track of. The steel guys figured it out a century ago: butt the tubes.
Well-designed butts can make your frame stronger and lighter. In fact, looking at what tube sizes have worked in steel is an excellent way to determine what properties are required for other materials. This is what Teixeira did in designing the excellent Varilite tubes, which came out in 1990 and were first used for Doug Bradbury's Manitou bikes. These were some of the first butted aluminum tubes to see wide use in the market.
Trek had been doing a bonded aluminum bike with butted tubing for a few years previous to that, but widespread use didn't happen until the last couple of years. Klein and Cannondale got on the program a couple of years ago, and the Specialized M2 just got butted this year.
The Varilite tubes have extremely thick walls in the areas of high stress, and they taper down in the areas that handle less stress. In this way, stresses are dispersed in the tube, and the life of the structure is increased. It's not rocket science, just good design.

Optimizing Aluminum's Advantages
To optimize the advantages of aluminum, you have to deal with its inherent disadvantages. One of the ways to accomplish this is by designing in a large margin for error. Although there are many different situations, Teixeira said that one rule of thumb he uses is to increase the tube's static strength by about three times that of the steel bike.
A lot of factors come into play here, so this isn't an iron- (or aluminum-) clad rule. A basic premise is that the lower the displacement (flexing), the lower the stress, resulting in less chance for fatigue. It's also good to spread the stresses out to places of lower loading. This is the idea behind butts, lugs and gussets. Spreading the stresses down the tube also allows you to build a bike that has more resilience and a lively feel, rather than an ultimately rigid structure.
Then there's stress corrosion, another eyebrow raiser. If you mess up that artificial aging, then stress corrosion may come back to haunt you. As you can see, we have a very complicated puzzle in front of us.
What does the future hold? I asked Teixeira this question, and the outlook wasn't full of fantastic new materials formerly used for Space Shuttle muffler bearings and F-16 dipsticks, as you might think. There will be advances, but the claims made by many of the slick marketers aren't panning out. It's still hard to beat good old 6061, when you look at the whole package. It's the most versatile of all alloys, has excellent toughness for an aluminum, and good elongation, too. Like the point I made last time with high-zoot CrMo versus generic CrMo, we know that you can make a good bike out of either - it's just that it takes smart design from the tube on up to build a good bike.We'll learn more about some of the new higher-strength aluminum alloys and associated materials in the exotics part of our series, which will come at the end, after titanium and carbon fiber.
As you may have guessed, the next installment in our Heady Metal series will cover titanium.

Metallurgy for Cyclists Steel is Real

by scot nicol

"Once giants lived in the earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered, and the earth shook. Fire and Wind struck down these giants ... but in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield. And we who found it are just men - not gods, not giants, just men. The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one, no one in the world can you trust - not men, not women, not beasts ... this you can trust." - Conan's dad, from the film "Conan the Barbarian."
Bicycle framebuilders have known about the secret of steel for a long time. In fact, steel has been used to build more bicycle frames than any other material. It has also been used about 50 years longer than any other material currently in use.
In this second installment of our six-part series on frame materials, you'll learn something about where steel comes from, and more about its advantages and disadvantages in bicycle-frame fabrication. But first, I'd recommend a re-read of the first installment of the series to familiarize yourself with the terminology.
Steel is made mostly of iron whose atomic symbol is Fe, from the Latin ferrum - and that's where the term ferrous comes from when we refer to ferrous and non-ferrous materials. As you may have guessed, steel is a ferrous material, and aluminum and titanium are non-ferrous.
Iron is the fourth most abundant element in the earth's crust, so in the near future we probably won't be running out of the material that's used to build steel bikes (chromium and molybdenum are different stories, however). Iron rarely occurs as a chemically pure metal, except in meteorites. On this planet, it's found in various forms, among them magnetite (Fe3O4), hematite (Fe2O3), siderite (FeCO3), pyrite (FeS2) ... and many other forms that end in 'ites.
How do we get from iron to steel? We add and subtract a couple of ingredients while its molten, and voilà, steel (actually it's a very involved and evolved process involving exothermic reactions, but we'll save that for the extended-play version of this article).
Specifically, 4130 steel - an alloy steel - which is commonly known in the bike industry as chrome-moly, contains the following alloying agents: 0.28- to 0.33-percent carbon, 0.4- to 0.6-percent manganese, 0.8- to 1.1-percent cromium, 0.15- to 0.25-percent molybdenum, 0.04-percent phosphorous, 0.04-percent sulfur, and 0.2- to 0.35-percent silicon. The other 95-plus percent is made up of good old-fashioned iron. Now, there are hundreds of kinds of steel, but 4130 finds its way into bike frames because, among other attributes, of its weldability, formability, strength, ductility and toughness. (Many low-buck frames are made with 1020 steel, which is called plain carbon steel, and has significantly lower strength than the chromium-molybdenum steels.)
The numbers that I'm throwing out are designated by the Society of Automotive Engineers and American Iron and Steel Institute: 41XX designates a chromium-molybdenum steel (CrMo), while 10XX designates a plain carbon steel - which, if compared to 41XX steels, has fewer alloying agents, lower strength and lower cost. The first number specifies the type of steel: 1 = plain carbon, 2 = nickel, 3 = nickel chromium, 4 = nickel, chromium and molybdenum, 5 = chromium, etcetera, ad nauseam.... The second number relates to different things with different alloys. In the case of 4130, it defines the percentage of chromium and molybdenum in the alloy. The last two numbers tell you the amount of carbon, expressed as hundredths of a percent. 4130 therefore has 0.3 percent carbon.
From now on, in the bicycle lexicon of this series, I'll be using 4130 and CrMo interchangeably, even though not all CrMo's are 4130. CrMo is by far the most common of all the steels used to build high- quality bicycle frames. And I'm making an assumption that the readers of VeloNews who ride steel frames aren't riding Muffy's (That's the generic name for the Murray-Huffy style of bike you can buy at those fine American institutions like Kmart and Wal-mart.) Muffy-grade steel is barely above rebar on the steel "food chain"; rebar is essentially a blend of melted 1956 Chevys, washing machines and shopping carts.

Choosing Steel as a Frame Material
The bicycle-frame designer must take many different factors into account when deciding what material to use for fabrication. Even after looking at all the characteristics, there is no clear choice.
But even so, there are many good reasons to use steel as your material of choice in a bicycle frame. Let's go over the physical characteristics that were defined last time, and see where steel fits into the scheme of things, as compared to titanium and aluminum.
(Disclaimer: For the sake of simplicity, I will refrain from making comparisons to carbon fiber, metal matrix composites and other materials now. When those materials are covered, comparisons will be drawn to Ti, Al and steel.

Density
We started with density in the opening article because it is perhaps the easiest property to understand. Unfortunately for steel, it is "density challenged," to use 1990s vernacular. Weighing in at 0.283 pounds per cubic inch, it's almost twice as dense as titanium (at 0.160) and pretty near three times the density of aluminum (at 0.098). Clearly, density is a very important property, because light weight is where it's at with bicycle frames these days, and high density makes it tough to push that weight envelope. Fortunately for steel, there are other important properties to examine.

Stiffness
This is where steel shines, as compared to Ti and Al. Young's Modulus for steel is approximately 30 million pounds per square inch. The titanium alloy Ti3Al-2V is 15.5 million psi, and 6061 aluminum is approximately 10 million psi. Those ratios (three to two to one) are almost identical to the density ratios between these three materials. That means that the stiffness-to-weight ratios for the three materials are about the same (provided you're looking at stiffness in tension or compression).
If you really want to know, Young's Modulus is the ratio of stress-to-strain in the region below the proportional limit on the stress-strain curve. This was briefly described last issue. All you need to know is: the bigger the number, the stiffer the material. Wait a minute, though. How come, if steel is so stiff and Al is not so stiff, that those big-tubed aluminum bikes are so incredibly stiff? Young's modulus measures the stiffness for all of these materials with the same-size specimen, or section. We can call the measurement section modulus. One of the pieces of the puzzle the bike designer gets to throw in is the size and wall thickness of the tubing used. Then we get to figure the polar-section modulus of the material by the formula: 0.196 (D4-d4)/D). All this formula says is that as a tube's diameter increases (D), the stiffness increases to the third power of that number (d is the inside diameter). Comparing a one-inch tube and a two-inch tube of equal wall thickness., the fatty is going to be eight times as stiff as the little weenie tube. And the weight will only double. Now does the ride of those Kleins and Cannondales start to make sense?
Another simple illustration of how this works is to compare two tubes of the same weight, and look at the increase in stiffness as you increase the diameter. Take a one-inch steel tube with a wall thickness of 0.049 inches. Compare that to a 1.5-inch tube with a wall thickness of 0.032 inches. They weigh the same, but the 1.5-inch tube is 1.6 times as stiff.
Your next question should be: "Why not increase the diameter of steel tubes like you do with aluminum, so that we get an even lighter bike?" This is where the "beer-can effect" comes into play. As a tube's diameter-to -wall thickness ratio gets above 60- or 70-to-one, the tube is more likely to suffer failure due to buckling, or "beer canning." Al and Ti, being lower density materials, allow you to have thicker, buckling-resistant walls.

Elongation
Once again, this property is an indicator of ductility. Simply, it measures how far a material will stretch before it breaks.While the previous properties - density and stiffness - don't change significantly with alloy and heat treatment in any given material, elongation is another story. Like strength, elongation is all over the map depending on heat treatment and the nature of the alloy. Elongation is expressed as a percentage.
When tensile testing a material, it's pulled apart and stretched until it breaks. Marks are made on the specimen, and the distance between them is measured before and after the specimen breaks. The difference is expressed as the percentage elongation. Steels used in bike tubing typically measure elongations of 9 to 15 percent. If the elongation number dips below 10 percent, I consider it a flag to take a closer look at the overall properties of the material.
Risk of brittle frame failure increases as this number decreases. In particular, you need to look into the strengths of the material - toughness and the endurance limit. And within these tests - toughness for example - who's to say which method would be better: Charpy, Izod, or some other test? Accurately analyzing a material with low elongation requires a lot more information and expertise than I can provide you in this short and sweet synopsis.

Tensile Strength: Ultimate and Yield
There is a huge variation in the measured tensile strength of different steel alloys and different brands. Generic CrMo might have a yield strength of 90 KSI, whereas True Temper OX3 measures out at almost twice as much: 169 KSI. It's possible for a bike that's made out of either of these materials to break. We know for a fact that straight gauge American airframe tubing is a very reliable material to build a bike with. But it has a strength of only 90 KSI. Again, maybe we'll find that the toughness and elongation of this material is fantastic, so we can get by with a lower strength.
If the True Temper OX3 tubing is twice as strong, does that mean you can build a frame with half the wall thickness? Yes. Will it be as strong? No. Will it be as stiff? Heck no. Will is last as long? Doubt it.

The Big Picture
The point here is that there is a lot to consider. If you merely look at a couple of the numbers, you're not necessarily getting the whole picture. It's easy for a metallurgist to convince an ad guy about the superiority of one material over another. Look at the two materials mentioned above. Very different strength numbers, identical density, yet you can build a good bike out of either material.
Steel is a wonderfully reliable material for building bikes. It's safe to say that there's no more successful material ever used. It's easy to work with, can be easily welded or brazed, requires simple tools for fabrication, fails in a predictable manner (as opposed to sudden or catastrophic), and is cheap!There have been few challengers to steel's throne of best material in the last 100 years. For a couple of decades, we have seen aluminum increasingly being used in bikes, and titanium has been used successfully for about 10 years.But it's 1994 now, and steel is being seriously challenged by an increasing array of promising new materials. To learn more about these, stay tuned....The next installment of this "Heady metal" series will cover aluminum.

Metallurgy for Cyclists

by scot nicol

What is the best material to use in building a bicycle frame - steel, aluminum, titanium or carbon fiber? What about something even more exotic? While this certainly isn't as important a topic as who will replace Shannon on "Beverly Hills: 90210," it is fodder for lengthy debates among bike junkies (like myself).
The six-part series we're about to start will examine metallurgy as it applies to bicycles. If we do our job right, you will be educated about all the popular materials currently used in bicycle-frame construction, and we'll take a look at what you can expect for the future.
What I also hope to do is give you a "BS" filter for the clever and often misleading ads that our industry uses to prey on the underinformed. It really doesn't matter that boralyn was used for tank armor, or that rocket scientists designed your bike. You don't even have to wear a white lab coat to design a good bike. Sound engineering and an intimate knowledge of the biomechanical interface between bike and rider are the only prerequisites.
To begin, you have to understand that the traditional bicycle frame is a highly evolved mechanical structure - highly evolved as in 100 years of tinkering. Attempts are constantly made to improve on its design, but most do little improving. Just designing a better frame may look like a simple problem, but it's not. Small improvements are made with materials and engineering advances, but improving by leaps and bounds doesn't happen - unless you believe the ads.
Because the science of bike design is so complex, I won't be able to cover everything that's involved. Instead, I'll stick to the most important ingredients in the mix, and you won't be finding out about body-center cubic versus face-center cubic phases, or about grain boundaries or persistent slip planes. But you'll still get plenty of pertinent information to think about.
Understanding materials' properties is essential to understanding these materials. Unfortunately, terminology related to properties is tossed around at random - this bike is stiff; that bike has a better stiffness-to-size-of-decal-on-the-downtube ratio; this other bike is fortified with 11 essential vitamins and minerals - you've heard the jargon.
In this first installment, I'll define the real terminology for you, both in the technical sense and according to what it means as related to a bicycle. For the subsequent five parts of this series, steel, titanium, aluminum, carbon fiber and "other" will be examined, in that order. You'll draw on the wonderful knowledge learned in this introduction to enlighten you down the road apiece.
Let's Get Right Into It
What material properties are important in choosing bicycle frame material? First, there are three types of material properties:
Physical - Density, color, electrical conductivity, magnetic permeability, and thermal expansion.
Mechanical - Elongation, fatigue limit, hardness, stiffness, shear strength, tensile strength, and toughness.
Chemical - Reactivity, corrosion resistance, electrochemical potential, irradiation resistance, resistance to acids, resistance to alkalis, and solubility.
Density and corrosion resistance are important, for obvious reasons. You won't have much use for information on magnetic permeability and irradiation resistance. And all of the mechanical properties are very important. But what do all of these terms mean, and why are they important? I'm coming to that....

Density
We'll start with an easy one. This is how much a material weighs for a given volume. For example, 6061 aluminum weighs 0.098 pounds per cubic inch. 4130 steel weighs 0.283 lb./in3, and 3/2.5 titanium is 0.160 lb./in3. This is an important and easy relationship to remember: Titanium is about half the density of steel, aluminum is about one-third the density of steel. Use that as a guideline, then start to look at other properties, like strength and stiffness. So you ask, why doesn't an aluminum frame weigh one third that of a steel frame? Read this series and you'll know the answer.

Stiffness
The measurement for stiffness is called modulus of elasticity, or Young's modulus. This, like density, is reasonably easy to understand. If you're "in the know," you'll refer to modulus rather than stiffness in your conversations with friends. Consider: "Like, dude, the pot metal on that Huffy is way stiff," versus, "I postulate, but do not conclude unequivocally, that the modulus of the Sandspeed material is adequate for its intended application." See how much smarter modulus makes you sound?
Young's modulus doesn't change with different alloys or heat treatments of the same metal. A heat-treated Prestige tube isn't stiffer than a seamed 1020 steel tube of the same dimensions. 6061 aluminum tubes with the same diameter and wall thickness are all equally stiff. But when you start using lithium or aluminum oxide, the modulus changes - although the same material won't change stiffness with a change in heat treatment. Can anyone name an exception to this rule?

Elongation
I know that this sounds like an exciting property, but it's not. Elongation measures how far a material will stretch before it breaks. It's a measure of the material's ductility. What's ductility? It's the ability of a material to deform plastically without fracturing. What's plastic deformation? It's when a material deforms when a load is applied, and remains deformed after the load is released (i.e. "it bends"). Taffy has lots of ductility. Glass is not very ductile, and it has no elongation. Breaking like a piece of glass is not an acceptable failure mode for bikes. What you want is a material that will bend before it breaks. Yes, elongation is a very important property to evaluate when you're looking at materials, and I'll examine elongation with each material analyzed.

Tensile Strength
This is another extremely important property. "The more strength the better" is a good rule of thumb, but only if you keep close tabs on other properties at the same time. It's called tensile strength because the test used to determine the bending and breaking point of the specimen is done by pulling the sample apart (applying tension).
Now, bikes don't normally fail because tension loads are too high, so it can seem like a stupid test. But, fortunately, the test also happens to be a pretty good indicator of how the material is going to behave - tensile test results are used to indicate strength, ductility, stiffness, and proper parameters for heat treatment or processing. Besides, the compressive strength of metals tends to closely follow tensile strength.
To perform a tensile test, you grab each end of a specimen of a known cross-sectional area, and start yanking. As stress (force per unit area) increases, so does strain (a change in dimension due to stress). Plotting this stress and strain relationship will give you a curve called the load-extension curve. From this, you can determine some of the qualities mentioned above, as well as where the yield and ultimate strengths are. Yield is where you permanently stretch the material; and ultimate is the peak load it will take, usually very close to the point where it fractures.

Fatigue Strength
Guess what? This is another important property to consider but, once again, not by itself. Fatigue failure occurs by applying cyclic stress of a maximum value less than the static tensile strength of the material ... until your specimen fails. This can be a cool test, because the alternating stress mimics vibrations and impacts that happen when you ride your bicycle down the long and winding road.
The fatigue strength itself is a measure of the stress at which a material fails after a specific number of cycles. What's tough though, is designing the proper test. Again, a bicycle is a complex puzzle to consider. There is no standard test for fatigue. Another kink is that fatigue tests are done by cyclic loading of similar stress, whereas the loads you apply to your bicycle parts are uniform.
Ferrous alloys (a.k.a. steel) and titanium have a threshold below which a repeating load may be applied an infinite number of times without causing failure. This is called the fatigue limit, or endurance limit. Aluminum and magnesium don't exhibit an endurance limit, meaning that even with a miniscule load, they will eventually fail after enough load cycles.

Toughness
This is the ability of a metal to absorb energy and deform plastically before fracturing. A tough metal is more ductile and deforms rather than fracturing in a brittle manner - particularly in the presence of stress raisers such as cracks and notches. Since a very important requirement of bicycle tubes is their ability to deform and give warning of impending failure, toughness is an important property to measure. All things considered, toughness is a dense and complex property to analyze. There are many different ways to measure, some apply to bicycle applications, some don't. Unless toughness is an issue with a certain property, I'll leave it alone. If it is an issue, as in the case of carbon fiber, you'll hear about it.

The Search for Perfection
To answer the question asked at the outset of this article, none of the materials described happen to be the perfect material to use - all have their advantages and disadvantages. Comparing and designing frames out of different materials is difficult because failure modes are so different. And welding, bonding, brazing, machining and finishing these materials are all accomplished differently. But the hardest part is wading through the bs from the marketing guys. Keep reading this series, though, and you'll know just enough to get yourself into trouble.

NANOTECHNOLOGY STORAGE TANKS

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Storing the fuel that is needed to run a hydrogen car in a compact and affordable way is still a major challenge. You would need about 5 kg of hydrogen to have the same average driving range as today's cars. Since hydrogen's density is only 1/10th of a gram per liter at room temperature, that means you somehow need to pack 50,000 liters of hydrogen into your tank. There are three ways of doing this: as a high-pressure compressed gas; a cryogenic liquid; or as a solid.
Compressed hydrogen gas tanks are used in early hydrogen-powered vehicles. Honda, which just two days ago announced that it began production for its FCX fuel cell vehicle, uses two 350-atmosphere high-pressure hydrogen tanks that give the car a 430 km driving range.
Rather than using hundreds of atmospheres to compress hydrogen into a tank, or cooling it down to minus 252 °C to liquefy it, hydrogen storage in solid form offers the safest alternative for transportation and storage of hydrogen. Research in this area has led to metal hydrides, chemical hydrides, and physisorption-based storage, where hydrogen is adsorbed onto the interior surfaces of a porous material. The stored hydrogen can then be released by heat, electricity, or chemical reaction. Many metals are capable of absorbing hydrogen as well.
The storage of gas in solids is not only an intriguing alternative for hydrogen storage but other types of gases, such as carbon dioxide and other environmentally important gases as well. Gas storage in solids is quickly becoming an important technology, with applications ranging from energy and the environment to biology and medicine. A new review article in Angewandte Chemie describes the types of material that make good porous gas storage materials, why different porous solids are good for the storage of different gases, and what criteria need to be met to make a useable gas storage material ("Gas Storage in Nanoporous Materials").
Written by Dr. Russell E. Morris and Dr. Paul Wheatley, a researcher in Morris' group at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, the paper discusses the use of nanoporous materials for gas storage in three areas: energy, medical, and environmental applications.
The two write that for most of these applications, but particularly hydrogen storage, we are still in the materials discovery phase of research. "Once materials with suitable properties have been made and characterized the research focus will change more towards making the applications work, bringing in engineering. This is already happening to some degree in certain areas but will undoubtedly increase in the others also. There are also some interesting gases (e.g. ozone) that have not yet been studied in this context, and there are opportunities for the innovative chemist here also."
Gas storage for energy applications
Safe, efficient and compact hydrogen storage is a major challenge in order to realize hydrogen powered transport. According to the U.S. Department of Energy Freedom CAR program roadmap the on-board hydrogen storage system should provide 6 weight % (wt%) of hydrogen capacity to be considered for the technological implementation.
Storage of hydrogen in nanoporous materials can lead to higher capacities than gas storage in a simple tank. Currently, the storage of hydrogen in the absorbed form is considered as the most appropriate way to solve this problem (see our Spotlight: "New carbon nanotube hydrogen storage results surpass Freedom Car requirements")
Several porous materials and strategies for enhancing hydrogen uptake are reviewed in the article. Given the current state of the research, the authors conclude that meeting the goals set by the Department of Energy, while theoretically possible, is a great challenge and it will take an exceptional Material to be successful.
Gas storage for medical applications
Morris and Wheatley write that, while energy applications of gas storage materials have recently taken the spotlight in this area, gas storage materials for medical applications are arguably much closer to commercialization.
"The field is dominated by the potential applications of nitric oxide, but there is scope for the development of other gases also. Prime amongst these is probably carbon monoxide as our understanding of the important biological relevance of this molecule is developing very quickly.
"Unlike energy applications there is much less emphasis on gas storage capacity when designing materials for medical applications. Often much more important is matching the release of a gas to that required biologically. This control over release kinetics is vital as the gases of interest are often toxic in large amounts (e.g. nitric oxide and carbon monoxide), while they may be ineffective if delivered in too small amounts."
Gas storage for environmental applications
The capture and storage of greenhouse gases could play a significant role in reducing the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and nanotechnology materials such as carbon nanotubes and nanoporous metals will play an important role in developing suitable storage applications (see "A role for nanotechnology in capturing and storing greenhouse gases").
For environmental gas storage the focus tends to be on high adsorption capacity materials. "The challenge here is to synthesize solids with large numbers of high energy interaction sites" the authors write. "The nature of carbon dioxide in particular means that there has already been demonstration of some interesting adsorption effects, particularly associated with the flexibility of the adsorbent materials, and we expect that as we understand these effects further we will be able to produce better materials."
Overall, the authors conclude that gas storage in porous materials is an area of great excitement and potential importance in all the areas covered in their review. They caution that the challenges associated with designing materials to have sufficient adsorption capacity, controllable delivery rates, suitable lifetimes, and recharging characteristics are not trivial in many instances. Furthermore, the different chemistry associated with the various gases of interest makes it necessary to carefully match the properties of the porous material to the required application.

ATOMIC LAYER DEPOSITION

(Nanowerk Spotlight) One of the true nanotechnologies that pre-dates the explosion of the popular use of the word during the past few years is Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD). This gas phase chemical process is used to create extremely thin coatings only a few nanometers thick which can be deposited in a precisely controlled way.
Initially used as a technique for making a specific type of light display (electroluminescent display) smaller and more efficient, the ALD process was invented and patented by Tuomo Suntola and his co-workers in Finland in 1974 (co-incidentally, this is the year that the term ‘nanotechnology’ was first defined by Norio Taniguchi).
Suntola’s advancement built upon existing technologies at the time; the general idea of electroluminescence had been around since 1907, when Captain Henry Joseph Round found that silicon carbide emitted light when sandwiched between two materials carrying electricity. Yet it was not until after ALD was developed that this electro-physical property could be made small and efficient enough to market electroluminescent products – many such systems are used in streetlights, and as the backlight in liquid crystal televisions and other technologies.
Thanks to ALD, electroluminescent displays could be made smaller, and required less electricity to function. Products using this nanotechnology suddenly became marketable in the 1980s – such as neon lights – once their electricity consumption became comparable to other options.
Dynamics of Atomic Layer Deposition
The fundamental notion behind Atomic Layer Deposition is rather simple: It is a process by which an atomic layer of material can be affixed to a surface material one layer at a time.
By depositing one layer per cycle, ALD offers extreme precision in ultra-thin film growth since the number of cycles determines the number of atomic layers and therefore the precise thickness of deposited film.
The process involves pushing a pulse of a heated chemical gas (or plasma) into a chamber, which contains a chemical substrate or some other material waiting to be coated. What makes ALD so perfectly uniform – meaning it doesn’t allow these gaseous atoms to pile-up on top of each other – is that it takes advantage of a limiting chemical reaction. This reaction only allows one atom at a time to bind to the surface material. And once all of the possible bonding-sites have been taken-up, the reaction stops, leaving behind a pinhole-free layer of molecules – like the thinnest paint coat physically possible.
Naturally, the ability to achieve this level of control for a layer of material has found an easy home in electroluminescence displays; since all that was needed to make the simple sandwiching technology more efficient was to make the sandwiched material thinner. Not surprisingly, even more applications for ALD have been imagined since 1974 – including nanomaterials.
Atomic Layer Deposition for Nanoparticles
Altering the surface properties of ultra-fine powders is one of the many potential applications of ALD, according to Dr. Alan Weimer, professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The possible uses of these fine powders can be found in virtually any area of materials science, he said.
“Basically, they’re particles that might be a micron in size, that might be used to fabricate parts,” Weimer said. "A lot of things that could be imprecisely considered nanoparticles have been around for a long time, simply because the processes used to make them have not required extremely high levels of control. Some of these particles are used to make shampoos thick or to give different properties to toothpaste, for example. Self-cleaning windows are another example. The particles are so small they’re transparent."
Although there may be nothing really new about the particles in many fine powder-type materials, there could be thousands of new applications for these materials if their surface chemistry could be altered in some way. Enter Atomic Layer Deposition.
Using ALD to increase biocompatibility of nanoparticles
“There’s a concern that certain particles will break down the skin, if they come into contact with it,” Weimer said. “The way to get around this is to put a coating on the particle so that it doesn’t make contact with the skin.”
According to Weimer, there are certain materials – such as some lithium compounds – that could be very effective sunscreens. However, there is a fear that these compounds might react with the skin to cause adverse side effects.
ALD offers an ideal way to change the surface properties of such chemicals, so that vastly more effective products might be brought to consumers. “We’ve basically invented a method for putting ALD on these particles,” he said.
Weimer’s method of ALD makes the application of the molecule-thick layer line-of-sight independent. This means that it is unimportant which way the material is facing or from where the coating is injected into the system – the ALD process will generate a perfect coating on every side, regardless.
Coating sunscreen particles using ALD would effectively block the type of ultraviolet radiation that has been lined to skin cancer, Weimer said. In general terms, there are two types of ultraviolet light: UVA and UVB. However, sunscreens on the market today only effectively block UVB light, Weimer said. This is unfortunate since UVA has been more strongly connected to the development of skin cancer.
“Coating lithium nanoparticles with Aluminum Oxide would make them unreactive with the skin,” he said. “And they’d block out the sun better.”
Weimer and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Dr. Steven George at CU, have started ALD NanoSolutions, Inc. to aid the development of products produced by their ALD technique.
“A lot can be done with ALD,” George said. “But its biggest application is really in semiconductor applications.”
Atomic Layer Deposition for Electromechanical Systems
Perhaps the most exciting application of ALD is in the development of electrical systems that use mechanical parts, rather than solid-state properties.
Electromechanical systems are all around us, from your standard wristwatch to a remote control car. In the modern world, we are virtually surrounded by machines that convert electrical energy into mechanical energy – the energy of motion.
But until the evolution of nanotechnology brought the world increasingly effective techniques for constructing materials on the nanoscale, all of these machines were relatively large and could not compete with other techniques that did not use moving parts, such as computer processors.
Now, the evolution of ALD is allowing researchers to build mechanical parts so small that, in theory, they could one day be part of a mechanically-powered computer – a computer relying on minute levers, gears and switches, rather than unmoving, solid-state inductors, capacitors and resistors.
“Mechanical structures have less loss than solid-state materials,” said Yuan-Jen Chang, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Chang works in Professor Victor M. Bright’s lab at CU, and is using ALD to construct electromechanical devices on the scale of just a few nanometers. These devices are known as nanoelectromechanical systems, or NEMS
“The idea of mechanical computers were suggested 100 years ago,” Chang said. “But the techniques are more mature now.”
Two of Chang’s projects involve depositing a layer – one atom or molecule thick – of material onto a substrate, and then shaping this material into certain mechanical structures.
After depositing layers of gold and then nickel to a silicon substrate, Chang applies an ALD layer of tungsten on top of these. Next, using a technique known as electron-beam discography, Chang carves a portion of the nickel layer – about 100 nanometers thick – out from in-between the ALD tungsten and the gold electrodes. The result is a single-atom-thick tungsten lever, held at one end by a bit of nickel, and free to move at the other end up and down on the gold electrode.
“This ALD tungsten works as a switch,” he said. “Since ALD tungsten actuates at a lower voltage than sold state computers, we could reduce the heat in these and still keep the performance.”
Chang’s ALD tungsten switch has been shown to maintain its properties at around 2,000 cycles. Although other groups are working on similar projects, no one has published their findings yet, Chang said.
“We suspect they have only achieved five to ten cycles before failure,” he said. “So this is a very big achievement.”
Using a similar approach, Chang has also managed to develop a nanoelectromechanical resonator that is capable of sensing masses of a bout one-quadrillionth of a gram – only a few times larger than the mass of a single DNA molecule.
“I believe we are the first group to use ALD for this purpose,” he said. “This could have many applications in the bio-field.”
Future of Atomic Layer Deposition
Despite being invented more than three decades ago, the technique of atomic layer deposition is continuing to advance and it promises to hold the key to perhaps hundreds of future advancements. From the creation of new or more effective chemicals to the development of mechanically driven computers, everything suggests that ALD’s role in nanotechnology and nanoscience will only continue to grow.

PLASTIC MOTORS DRIVEN BY LIGHT

(Nanowerk Spotlight) A fast-growing body of nanotechnology research is dedicated to nanoscale motors and molecular machinery. The results of these studies are spectacular: well-designed molecules or supramolecules show various movements upon exposure to various stimuli, such as molecular shuttles, molecular elevators and molecular motors. There are numerous Spotlights here on Nanowerk that cover this fascinating area, for example, just take a look at Nanotechnology reinvents the wheel or Catalytic nanotransporters for nanotechnology applications outside biological systems.
So far, however, nobody has been able to directly observe the movements of these molecular machines and utilize the mechanical work done by them. Now, an international group of researchers have succeeded in amplifying the minuscule change in structures at a molecular level caused by an external stimulus (light) to a macroscopic change through a cooperative effect of liquid crystals. Using liquid-crystalline elastomers (LCEs) – unique materials having both properties of liquid crystals (LCs) and elastomers – the scientists have successfully developed new photomechanical devices, including the first light-driven plastic motor. In other words, with this novel material the energy from light can be directly converted into mechanical work without the aid of batteries, electric wires, or gears.
"A motor device is one of the most useful energy conversion systems that can convert input energy directly into a continuous rotation" Dr. Tomiki Ikeda explains to Nanowerk. "Although chemomechanical motors and light-switchable molecular machines that can move objects by light have been demonstrated, light-driven plastic motors converting light energy directly into a rotation have not yet been realized."
Ikeda, a Professor of Polymer Chemistry in the Chemical Resources Laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and his group focus on the fundamental understanding of the interaction between light and polymer materials from the viewpoint of innovative photonic applications, and create photofunctional polymer materials with precisely controlled molecular alignment.
In their recent work, Ikeda's team in collaboration with Prof. Yanlei Yu's group at Fudan University in Shanghai and Prof. Christopher J. Barrett's group at McGill University in Montreal, have demonstrated new sophisticated motions of LCEs and their composite materials, which resulted in a plastic motor driven only by light.

The researchers prepared a continuous ring of the LCE film (containing an azobenzene moiety) by connecting both ends of the film. Upon exposure to UV light from the downside right and visible light from the upside right simultaneously, the ring rolled intermittently toward the actinic light source, resulting almost in a 360 degree roll at room temperature.
"This is the first example of this kind of photoinduced motion in a single layer film, although the rolling of the LCE ring used herein was slow, and stopped when the ring was broken by irradiation" says Ikeda.
He describes a plausible mechanism of the rotation is as follows: "Upon exposure to UV light, a local contraction force is generated at the irradiated part of the belt near the right pulley along the alignment direction of the azobenzene mesogens, which is parallel to the long axis of the belt. This contraction force acts on the right pulley, leading it to rotate in the counterclockwise direction. At the same time, the irradiation with visible light produces a local expansion force at the irradiated part of the belt near the left pulley, causing a counterclockwise rotation of the left pulley. These contraction and expansion forces produced simultaneously at the different parts along the long axis of the belt give rise to the rotation of the pulleys and the belt with the same direction. The rotation then brings new parts of the belt to be exposed to UV and to visible light, which enables the motor system to rotate continuously."
The size of the samples used in the experiments is in the range of millimeters, but is not in principle material-limited, so numerous applications even on the nanoscale are possible, especially where efficient power supply to mechanical system is battery-free and non-contact. These photomobile polymers function with a minimum of moving parts which minimizes the friction and surface contact difficulties that exist on a very small scale.
Ikeda points out that various complex three-dimensional movements such as rolling and rotation of cross-linked liquid-crystalline polymers with azobenzene dyes can be induced upon irradiation with light. Light can be handled remotely, instantly and precisely, especially with lasers, and these plastic materials (photomobile materials) can work as main driving parts of light-driven actuators without the aid of any other external power source.
"Few scientists believe that one could build mechanical systems only with organic materials like the ones that make up the human body" Ikeda says. "I believe that our work has demonstrated one possible way of building mechanical systems with organic materials. Ultimately, all-plastic cars driven solely by exposure to sunlight might be possible. They will have two sets of wheels covered with belts of photomobile polymer materials. By filtering the sunlight with plastic sheets, one can irradiate specific parts of the plastic belts with either UV or visible light to enable the plastic car to move. Today, this is just a dream. But one day it might become reality."
Apart from the fact that photomobile materials don't require batteries, electric wires, or gears, another intriguing aspect of these polymers is that they can be controlled remotely just by manipulating the irradiation conditions. By controlling the area of irradiation, wavelength and the intensity of the light, one can drive a film or fiber made of these materials in a manner of choice, which enables them to be used as a wide range of photo actuators.

Chemistry & Metallurgy

Actinide Chemistry The Actinide Chemistry Research is responsible for expanding AWE's understanding of the chemistry of the actinides relevant to weapon functionality, with particular emphasis on the corrosion behaviour of actinide weapon components when exposed to atmospheres containing hydrogen, oxygen and water. The team undertakes fundamental studies designed to elucidate the kinetics, thermodynamics and mechanism of these corrosion processes. The team uses custom-built gas handling lines to study these reactions as a function of temperature, pressure and gas composition and have the ability to monitor the real-time growth of corrosion sites using and optical reaction cell and dedicated image capture system. The team's technical output feeds directly into the modelling group's efforts to develop quantitative models of the corrosion behaviour of weapon components. Actinide Surface Science The surface science discipline sits on the boundary between solid state chemistry and condensed matter physics. In the former it can be used to investigate the chemical mechanism of corrosion, whereas in the latter the electronic density of states can measured. The AWE surface science facility is specially designed for working with plutonium materials and is predominantly used to investigate corrosion mechanisms of this unusual element. It consists of non-monochromatic X-ray, monochromatic ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy, inverse photoelectron spectroscopy and dynamic secondary ion mass spectrometry. All the techniques typically have an analysis area of 1 mm2. The equipment can be used for gas dosing from Langmuir (10-6 mbar) to 10 bar in pressure, atomic hydrogen and oxygen dosing and sample heating and cooling. Sample cleaning is achieved using one of three ion mills. Plutonium Metallurgy Plutonium is a highly radioactive metal that suffers the ingrowth of radiogenic impurities from the moment it is formed into a solid. The plutonium metallurgy research team is responsible for developing our understanding of the metallurgical properties of plutonium alloys and how these properties change with age. The team also supports certification of the plutonium used in production, makes and fabricates plutonium alloys in support of numerous trials and research programmes, and supplies expert advice on how changes in the production route may impact on the metallurgy of the finished component. The team utilises a wide range of experimental techniques in support of its programme including differential scanning calorimetry, thermo-mechanical analysis, resistively measurement, metallography and mechanical testing. Organic Materials The organic materials team undertakes ageing and lifetime prediction studies on a number of polymer materials. They also perform programmes to develop new materials based upon nano and molecularly filled systems as well as alternative foam structures. A selection of characterisation techniques are utilised to understand materials. These range from chemical characterisation methods such as UV/Vis, IR and NMR spectroscopy, through thermal and physical methods like DSC, TMA and DMTA to structure visualisation techniques based upon NMR imaging and X-ray microtomography. Inorganic Materials Recently the glass section has been focused on the immobilization of halide-containing radioactive wastes in glass and ceramic hosts. A method of immobilizing several chloride and fluoride containing wastes in a number of calcium phosphate minerals (apatite, spodiosite and whitlockite) is being developed. These mineral phases are then encapsulated within a glass matrix to yield a solid monolithic and durable wasteform. The group supports the Immobilisation Science Laboratory (ISL) at Sheffield University, but has also worked on a number of other projects including: glass-ceramic composites, chemically-strengthened frangible glass (command break), glass-ceramic-to-metal seals and coatings, crystallization kinetics of glasses; additionally, the section offers a problem solving service for glass related queries.