Morgan BellBetter than Teflon? Discovered by accident!
November 27th 2008 00:02
That's not good enough for these ungrateful scientists, though... they accidentally found a substance, which they call BAM, that is one of the world's hardest substances, and is much more slippery than Teflon.
Is that important? Damn straight - the fight against friction is what drives much of mechanical research... friction is the loss of kinetic energy to heat, which is, generally, something that we'd like to avoid.
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BAM is nearly as hard as diamond, which means that it can be used in industrial applications - additionally, whereas Teflon has a friction coefficient of 0.05, BAM throws down the gauntlet at just 0.02.
They don't know why it's so slippery - but they call it 'self-lubricating', that maybe the substance pulls in water molecules from the air, which coats the surface in a thin layer of water.
Would this work in an arid environment? Is there always water in air? What about in a hot engine - would this layer of water persist?
From the article:
"Bruce Cook, lead investigator on the Ames Lab project, estimates that merely coating rotors with the material could save US industry alone 330 trillion kilojoules (9 billion kilowatt hours) every year by 2030 - about $179 million a year."
-and, hey, who knows how long before we get a BAM-coated skillet. Right?
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