4 ms·

None of those need high strength.

by thfuran 2y ago

Auracle 2y ago
So says someone that's never used chintzy silverware.
- doubled112 2y ago
  Have you even lived until you've folded a spoon trying to scoop ice cream with it? Woah, I guess I don't know my own strength!
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    Chunky stainless steel flatware is the best. Being able to get the same thing in copper without significant loss of strength would be awesome.
    - amluto 2y ago
      You are welcome to eat with copper flatware and get sick if you eat something acidic or otherwise corrosive to copper. I’ll pass. There’s a reason that people tin-plate the food-contact surfaces of copper cookware.
      - kragen 2y ago
        It's not how you're imagining. I do in fact have some brass and alpaca "silverware". Because of the nickel, the alpaca stuff doesn't corrode; the brass stuff does, and if I don't keep the corrosion scrubbed off with steel wool, not only does it look like shit, acidic foods like yogurt taste bad. But I haven't gotten sick from it. It's probably not impossible to get sick that way, but it's challenging because of the short contact time, the low temperature, the small contact area, and the nasty taste. Boiling tomato sauce down in a copper pot for a couple of hours is a different situation, and I wonder if this may have contributed to the early modern belief that tomatoes were poisonous. But the toxicity of copper acetate from vinegar (verdigris, used as a pigment) was already well-known. Unplated copper pots have been commonplace for centuries and in use for millennia, and the most common way to get poisoned by them is to neglect to scrub off the blue-green basic copper carbonate that forms eventually from exposing wet copper to air. The carbonate is enormously more reactive to acids than the bare metal. My father-in-law related an incident from his childhood where a girl in his village got in a lot of trouble by poisoning half the village by cooking in unscrubbed copper! Nobody died, though. Heavy metal poisoning from copper is not the same kind of menace as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury. We can tolerate much higher levels, and it doesn't bioaccumulate.
  - ajuc 2y ago
    Bending iron horseshoes was a common party trick historically. Augustus II the Strong (king of PLC and elector of Saxonia) was known for doing it. Sounds impossible if you don't realize the horseshoes weren't steel.
- thfuran 2y ago
  The bar is at not-atrocious, not superalloy.
kragen 2y ago
Actually, they all do.
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  Depends on what is meant by high strength. Silverware is a fair point that hadn't occurred to me. Handrails is an interesting one but I suspect it's more cost effective to place a thin contact surface on top of something cheap. The others I'm not so sure about. I think you'd have corrosion issues with water tanks and bacterial issues there are easily addressed by regulating temperature. And why would heat exchangers require particularly high strength? Since when are those a structural component? In any case as you said electroplating something cheap is probably the way to go.
  - kragen 2y ago
    Recuperator-type heat exchangers need high-strength materials because both the strength of a wall and its thermal resistance are proportional to its thickness. So, if you can magically make copper five times stronger, you can make it one fifth as thick, cutting its thermal resistance by a factor of 5 and getting a much better heat exchanger. As for water tanks, regulating temperature is not always "easy", and a major reason copper is used for water pipes is its great resistance to corrosion. In this case apparently it will be more expensive than the same mass of stainless, but it's apparently also stronger than stainless, so maybe you can use less of it, making it cheaper again.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      Fair point about water pipe corrosion, my mistake. Although thinking about it more carefully what is strength saving you there other than cost? This material is going to be at least a 10x cost premium judging by the elemental composition. And if we're talking household temperatures I expect there are polymer coatings that would work better. The heat exchanger point is interesting. However doesn't stainless already lose out to 3D printed aluminum for the sort of applications where the optimization is worth the cost? This material is even heaver than steel and substantially more expensive. It's tangential but I wonder how amenable to 3D printing this material will prove to be.
fsckboy 2y ago
you're not making them thin enough

None of those need high strength.

Auracle 2y ago

So says someone that's never used chintzy silverware.

doubled112 2y ago
Have you even lived until you've folded a spoon trying to scoop ice cream with it? Woah, I guess I don't know my own strength!
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  Chunky stainless steel flatware is the best. Being able to get the same thing in copper without significant loss of strength would be awesome.
  - amluto 2y ago
    You are welcome to eat with copper flatware and get sick if you eat something acidic or otherwise corrosive to copper. I’ll pass. There’s a reason that people tin-plate the food-contact surfaces of copper cookware.
    - kragen 2y ago
      It's not how you're imagining. I do in fact have some brass and alpaca "silverware". Because of the nickel, the alpaca stuff doesn't corrode; the brass stuff does, and if I don't keep the corrosion scrubbed off with steel wool, not only does it look like shit, acidic foods like yogurt taste bad. But I haven't gotten sick from it. It's probably not impossible to get sick that way, but it's challenging because of the short contact time, the low temperature, the small contact area, and the nasty taste. Boiling tomato sauce down in a copper pot for a couple of hours is a different situation, and I wonder if this may have contributed to the early modern belief that tomatoes were poisonous. But the toxicity of copper acetate from vinegar (verdigris, used as a pigment) was already well-known. Unplated copper pots have been commonplace for centuries and in use for millennia, and the most common way to get poisoned by them is to neglect to scrub off the blue-green basic copper carbonate that forms eventually from exposing wet copper to air. The carbonate is enormously more reactive to acids than the bare metal. My father-in-law related an incident from his childhood where a girl in his village got in a lot of trouble by poisoning half the village by cooking in unscrubbed copper! Nobody died, though. Heavy metal poisoning from copper is not the same kind of menace as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury. We can tolerate much higher levels, and it doesn't bioaccumulate.
- ajuc 2y ago
  Bending iron horseshoes was a common party trick historically. Augustus II the Strong (king of PLC and elector of Saxonia) was known for doing it. Sounds impossible if you don't realize the horseshoes weren't steel.
thfuran 2y ago
The bar is at not-atrocious, not superalloy.

kragen 2y ago

Actually, they all do.

fc417fc802 2y ago
Depends on what is meant by high strength. Silverware is a fair point that hadn't occurred to me. Handrails is an interesting one but I suspect it's more cost effective to place a thin contact surface on top of something cheap. The others I'm not so sure about. I think you'd have corrosion issues with water tanks and bacterial issues there are easily addressed by regulating temperature. And why would heat exchangers require particularly high strength? Since when are those a structural component? In any case as you said electroplating something cheap is probably the way to go.
- kragen 2y ago
  Recuperator-type heat exchangers need high-strength materials because both the strength of a wall and its thermal resistance are proportional to its thickness. So, if you can magically make copper five times stronger, you can make it one fifth as thick, cutting its thermal resistance by a factor of 5 and getting a much better heat exchanger. As for water tanks, regulating temperature is not always "easy", and a major reason copper is used for water pipes is its great resistance to corrosion. In this case apparently it will be more expensive than the same mass of stainless, but it's apparently also stronger than stainless, so maybe you can use less of it, making it cheaper again.
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    Fair point about water pipe corrosion, my mistake. Although thinking about it more carefully what is strength saving you there other than cost? This material is going to be at least a 10x cost premium judging by the elemental composition. And if we're talking household temperatures I expect there are polymer coatings that would work better. The heat exchanger point is interesting. However doesn't stainless already lose out to 3D printed aluminum for the sort of applications where the optimization is worth the cost? This material is even heaver than steel and substantially more expensive. It's tangential but I wonder how amenable to 3D printing this material will prove to be.

fsckboy 2y ago

you're not making them thin enough