Researchers develop thermoformable ceramics, 'a new frontier in materials' | Hacker News Reader

Researchers develop thermoformable ceramics, 'a new frontier in materials'

phys.org

159 pointsPaulHoule46 comments

What is the material? What elements is it made of? They never mentioned in the article.

EDIT: Boron Nitride. I see it’s in the title of the linked paper. Why do articles emit such obviously pertinent information? sigh It’s all just narrative.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202203939

> "If you put an aluminum heatsink into an RF component, you've basically introduced a series of antennae to interact with the RF signal," Erb says. "Instead, we can put our boron nitride-based material in and around an RF component and it is essentially invisible to the RF signal."

It's right there in the article.

I stand corrected!

> Why do articles emit such obviously pertinent information? sigh It’s all just narrative.

That's because this is a press release (i.e. advertisement) from the associated university's communications department, not a news article or a scientific publication.

It actually is in the article in a quote.

In my weird layman predictions of the future, I feel like the "material age" is going to be our next new horizon, along with genetics.

Graphene, memristors, strange ceramics, transparent aluminum, aerogel, etc. Lots of interesting things that look and act like magic.

Are you saying that the next age will be defined by new materials? Or will just be more broadly considered an age of new materials?

Because, almost without exception, the former describes all human ages

Great question, and great observation, too.

It's hard to say. The pace of change is happening so fast, it's hard to predict.

Disclaimer: Massive hand-waving here

But, I think these exotic materials will be stepping stones to other things. I don't think we can get next-gen AI until we can build skeumorphic neural chips with memristor-type arrays with massive densities.

You can't get to nano-tech until you can predicatively arrange atoms. And once you can do that, you can only other exotic materials.

High temperature (or room temperature) super conductors will allow massive magnetic fields for common applications -- not just high-end MRI's that require cooling.

Graphene is so weird it can pretty much do anything.

I think the under-pinning for all these advances is material science. For me, it will be tech that looks like magic.

Finally, a way get rid of plastics and alluminium with the best properties of both! Looking forward to my all-ceramical laptop case

Depending on the weight, it could also be used in flight, automotive, industry, or even construction. Very cool new frontier!

It’s probably still relatively brittle at room temperature.

What is the difference between ceramic and 'ceramical'?

How it's pronounced by Jony Ive.

It looks like it's a thin film that can bend, not a bulk material. Still, a non-conductive heat conducting material safer than beryllium oxide would be quite useful.

Thin sheets might not be that much of a drawback if you can layer and fuse them, or even better make a composite sandwich like sea shells. It's going to be interesting to see how it gets commercialized.

> a non-conductive heat conducting material safer than beryllium oxide would be quite useful

(As long as it's cheaper than diamond!)

And hotter than superfluid helium II

So this is both thermoformable, and also heat-conducting. My understanding is that ceramics are usually very much neither of those. Are those properties connected, or is this a coincidence? Are ceramics usually not thermoformable because they're insulating?

In this context, ceramic just means non-metal and non-organic. Plenty of ceramics have decent thermal conductivity - in fact, diamonds are ceramics and they are some of the most thermally conductive things ever. However, ceramics are very much not something you can thermoform. Even silicone (aka siloxane polymers) can’t be thermoformed. I’m not a huge ceramics expert but every ceramic I’ve ever used has been a thermoset.

Hexagonal boron nitride (this is very similar to graphite, but is not electrically conductive) in a binder of (I think) boron oxide. The latter melts at 450 C, which isn't very high. The new thing here apparently is a process for aligning the particles of BN so the material has high thermal conductivity.

If you can somehow turn this into a filament, then perhaps it could be 3D printed with cheap off-the-shelf printers.

and we can start to make our own sea-shells, horray! I, for one, salute our mer-man overlords.

This sounds cool, but am I stupid for thinking that the whole point of ceramics is that they're already malleable? That's why we have ceramic crockery, etc..

I think the problem being solved is that once you take a crock out of the kiln, you can’t reshape it.

Well, not with the stipulation it stays in one piece, but that never stopped young-me from reconfiguring all manners of my mom's vases

I can see why that would be useful in some circumstances, but not the more common ones they describe. Why is it necessary that a ceramic heatsink for a phone be re-formed, rather than just cast in the correct shape to begin with?

It’s incredibly difficult to form conventional ceramics into “the correct shape to begin with” with even millimeter tolerances because it shrinks twice during production. First when the liquid from the slurry/clay evaporates, and again when the particles sinter together during firing in the kiln. Both of these are non-linear and can cause warping with complex geometries.

EDIT: binders also typically burn off during firing, which further complicates changing shape during firing.

It’s kind of amazing that you can get a ceramic container where the lid fits snuggly. Some of that comes from modifying the greenware (dried but unfired clay) but I think most of it is exacting tolerances for inputs and processing. Clay from this one quarry. This much water. These building temperatures and humidity. This exact furnace temperature and time.

The only way I've seen this done is by lapping the touching surfaces after firing.

One can fire a pot with the lid on it in the kiln. They tend to deform together. Of course, this requires that the mating surfaces not fuse together and may also produce a non-rotationally-symmetric interface.

I feel like I've watched videos where people make Japanese and/or Korean ceramic cook pots and I can't for the life of me remember how they kept them from warping, just that they do.

The only trick I do remember is don't glaze the contact point between the two pieces. That not only adds thickness variability, but if glaze touches the bottom of the kiln you fuse to the bricks, so you have to elevate anything glazed, and elevating increases warping.

How do they create things like ceramic turbo turbines and ceramic exhaust manifolds? Seems like the shrinkage problem would prevent these close tolerances.

The same shrinkage problem exists for the ceramic tooth crowns.

The vendor of the dental ceramic provides a program that uses a mathematical model of the shrinkage to compute the form required for the ceramic crown before sintering.

Of course the mathematical model is not perfect so the dentist may still have to do some small adjustments to the sintered crown.

Lots of trial and error and tossed parts during manufacture. Neither of those parts are known for being cheap.

An oven doesn’t reach 300°C, blacksmiths work metal above 800°C, when it becomes ductile. Most of us don’t seem to have problems with that notion, except when discussing 9/11 that is.

If your computer is hitting oven temperatures you have a very big problem.

I'm not sure, but here's what might be the case:

If you have a phone made of today's ceramics and drop in on concrete, and it cannot be deformed, it will shatter.

Since this new material can be malleable, when you drop your phone, it doesn't shatter.

That would be handy, but that's not the case here since it only deforms under high heat/pressure, not in normal room temperature conditions.

I hope Corning comes calling.

It’s been a long while since Corningware was the coolest shit on the block. You find a ceramic that thermoforms above 300°C but below kiln temperature and you’ve got a more efficient production process for pans, for cooking to heat shields.

So basically a ceramic that gets squishy when heated, so it can be molded and such. Like plastic.

i thought the samw thing - hopefully without the various health effects of plastic leeching into food, which still concerns me!

New 3D printing filament? Or does it require too high of a temperature?

450c would be in the range of what PEEK printers can do: https://www.matterhackers.com/store/l/intamsys-funmat-ht-enh...

This is likely to improve joint replacement surgery’s implant precision and efficacy.

Does that mean we can 3D print ceramics soon?

Clay printers already exist, so technically you already can. Of course you need an oven to bake the result afterwards, and it won't be this exotic new type of ceramic.

That would be huge. We can already 3d print concrete though, is it that different?

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