Giz Explains: What Is Liquidmetal? [Giz Explains]

Apple has a new toy. It’s a materials company called Liquidmetal, and everybody’s talking! Problem is, nobody seems too sure what they’re talking about. So, Liquidmetal: What is these items? And what does Apple want with it?

Liquidmetal. It’s a subtly powerful name, invoking images ranging from self-healing Terminators to Alex Mack. It’s also an oxymoron: Liquid, metal. And while Apple probably isn’t entering into the T2000 business, they’ll have huge plans for our new mystery metal.

Liquidmetal piques our interest. Not because it’s ultra-modern-it was first delivered to market in 2003, and only after years of development-but precisely because it’s not. It’s been used before in golf clubs and baseball bats; it’s been sent to space; it’s been sent to work by none apart from the maligned Deepwater Horizon drilling rig; it’s even been used in consumer electronics that you simply’ve probably encounter yourself. (You know those SanDisk Cruzer Titanium USB drives, with the slide-out connectors? Yeah, those aren’t manufactured from titanium.)

And yet suddenly, in spite of everything these years, Apple doesn’t just would like to use Liquidmetal, it wants to own it, and to keep it from everyone else. Why? What do they see that everyone else hasn’t? And what does it mean for the long run of Apple products, and for everyone else within the industry?

The Science

The scientific definition of Liquidmetal goes something like this: Liquidmetal is a member of a class of metal alloys known formally as bulk metallic glasses-because the fabric shares some properties most closely associated with glass, like impact brittleness, and, rather then a set melting point, a steady loss of integrity at higher temperature. It’s a combination of things you’ve probably heard of: copper, titanium, aluminum and nickel. So yeah, fundamentally, it’s just one of those stuff, like a polymer, an aluminum alloy, or a tumbler.

The secret’s in how it’s made: In preference to simply mixing the alloy and letting it cool, amorphous alloys are cooled more quickly. This changes their atomic structures, in turn altering their basic properties. Ordinary metals typically have crystalline, ordered atomic structures, and therefore are likely to deform when struck or flexed; amophous alloys are made from chaotic, unordered atoms, which are likely to spring back into shape, more like a liquid. (Most metals have directional grains, like wood. Liquidmetal doesn’t.)

What makes Liquidmetal special compared to other amorphous alloys is that it’s easier to make. To brutally simplify things, it doesn’t should be cooled as quickly as other similar materials, and may be cooled-read: made-in greater quantities.

Like I said, you’ve probably heard something along these lines, either more precise or less, but unless you’ve got some extent inside the physical sciences, descriptions like this don’t mean much. So it’s got a unusual atomic structure. What does that matter?

What It Is

So you’ve got a bit of Liquidmetal on your hand. What does it seem like? What does it feel like? ” By way of color and look, Liquidmetal alloy seems like an ordinary metal, more like chrome steel than aluminum, albeit with its own distinct metallic color.” That’s Dr. Atakan Peker, probably the most researchers behind Liquidmetal. He worked with the company for more than 10 years, and now the Director of Advanced Materials at WSU. ” In a thin card or rod form, it feels a lot more flexible than chrome steel or aluminum. However, as you bend it more, it feels much stronger and should require so much more force to bend… One could ponder Liquidmetal alloy as a miles stronger plastic.”

The coolest thing about Liquidmetal is that, as circumstances get more extreme, so do its behaviors. From a NASA report on the substance:

In the experiment, three marble-sized balls made up of steel were dropped from an identical height into their own glass tubes. Each tube had another form of metal plate at the bottom: steel, titanium, Liquidmetal. Once each ball was dropped they were left to bop. The balls hitting the steel and titanium plates bounced for 20 to 25 seconds. The ball hitting the Liquidmetal plate bounced for 1 minute and 21 seconds. Through the experiment, this was the simplest ball that bounced outside its tube

Hints of flubber here, no?

Dr Peker gave me a fair more vivid image: ” If one makes a paperclip from Liquidmetal alloy, it’ll stay quite flexible and one would likely hurt or cut a finger or two before deforming it permanently.” Attempt to bend that Liquidmetal, kid, and you’re going to hurt yourself.

But lest we get caught organising a mythology here, we must always point out that it’s had a limited success in real products. There was that SanDisk key. Samsung stuck some Liquidmetal parts in a few phones-screen frames and hinge parts, to be specific. And it’s telling that the particular models are just about indistinguishable from the ones that don’t.

But the further we break out from consumer electronics, the more exciting Liquidmetal’s story becomes. In earlier incarnations, it’s lived both inside golf balls on on the face of $600 clubs, where its extreme bounciness was a boon but its lack of refinement can have been a fault-many of the clubs where known to shatter, spectacularly and without so much as a ” FOOOORRREE.” (This little fiasco pushed Liquidmetal, the company, into ” substantial” debt.)

It’s been used in Rawlings baseball bats and Head tennis racquets; it’s been wrapped around the cores of a number of skis. It was treated an awful lot like titanium: something that makes a product premium, and that looks good on paper, but which you may not notice in case you weren’t told. Andre Agassi used a Liquimetal racquet for it slow, but does anyone think he wouldn’t have won the 2003 Australian Open with another piece?

The military has molded it into tips of armor-piercing Kinetic Energy Penetrator (KEP) bullets, and it’s been used to make ultra-hard scalpels. It’s been built into replacement joints for humans. It has fans at NASA, which has sent it to space a handful of times for experiments, and once in solar wind collector tiles above the doomed Genesis probe. In step with an old BP/Transocean drilling contract, it’s almost certain that the drilling rig that devastated the Gulf of Mexico used Liquidmetal-under the name Armacor-in its drill pipe. (Armacor hasn’t been implicated inside the disaster.)

To sum it up: Liquidmetal is beneficial anywhere you are able to imagine an exceptionally hard, somewhat flexible, easily moldable piece of stuff to be useful. Which makes it the complete more odd that Apple wants to own it-not just partially, but all of the way. They’ve purchased the exclusive rights to a substance that, on the face of it, has been less successful in gadgets than in most other industries it’s been used for. Even weirder? It’s conceivable that Apple will soon be licensing technology to the military-industrial complex, to the areospace companies, and to deep-sea drilling companies. The movie villains.

Why Apple Bought It

There are only two tips on how to know what Apple would do with Liquidmetal. One of the most obvious, and least more likely to work, could be to ask Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive or an Apple engineer. Ha. Alternately you have to just see how they already have. Yup, it turns out that ahead of their purchase, Apple presided over what may well be probably the most largest deployments of a Liquidmetal product in history: the iPhone.

Speaking to Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac, Dr Peker noticed something odd concerning the iPhone’s SIM ejector pin: ” I recognized it immediately. Take it from a professional, that’s Liquidmetal.” So yeah, Americans (in other parts of the realm the pins appear to be steel): go find your iPhone 3G/3GS box (sorry iPhone 4 owners, your MicroSIM’s ruining the joys. Again.), dig that pin out and feast your eyes: you’re in possession of a tiny little piece of Liquidmetal.

This tells us… well, not much. It shows that the brass at Apple has been enthusiastic about Liquidmetal for longer than they’ve let on. It also tells us that they’ve found someone, somewhere, capable of turning out millions of small pieces of the stuff. Dr Peker notes that the rationale Liquidmetal hasn’t taken off in consumer electronics likely has less to do with the inherent promise of the fabric than a ” lack of an appropriate manufacturing infrastructure.” Nobody’s truly thrown their weight behind it, so it’s simply been too expensive to make. But that’s not an insurmountable problem: All it’d take is an organization with patience, money and leverage over hardware manufacturers. It’ll take a corporation like… Apple.

So in a fabric scientist’s wildest imagination, what could Apple do with these things? Dr Peker points to probably the most obvious use for a difficult, non-deforming, non-corroding and usually scratch resistant material: cases.

Plastics are flexible but not strong, and while metals are much stronger than plastics, they’re not as flexible. Liquidmetal alloys provides a harder casing, that is far more proof against dents, nicks, scratches and breakage than hard plastics.

In case you drop a plastic-encased phone, it cracks or scuffs. When you drop a metal-encased phone, it dents, or nicks. If you drop a Liquidmetal-encased phone, well, it’ll just bounce. For like, a minute and 21 seconds. Maybe. In theory.

Pekar also proposed a use that’s ripped straight from the headlines, talking again to Leander Kahney: It can be used for an antenna-and actually already has been, in a Novatel wireless modem built for Verizon. That the last iPhone’s fraught antenna was also portion of its case might be no small coincidence-Liquidmetal is definitely moldable, and given all of the shit Apple had to eat during Antennagate, it’s reasonable to think that they’re scrambling for an alternate. And this one wouldn’t have seams.

But probably the most realistic outcome of this purchase is, to take advantage of the word of the day, subtle. Like every other good material, Liquidmetal might be asked to disappear into a product at the service of design. An iPhone with a Liquidmetal antenna, as an example, wouldn’t be marketed as a Liquidmetal iPhone-it’d be marketed as a marginally better iPhone.

And let’s say it finds its way into the hinges of our MacBooks, under the belief that it’ll loosen or wear less quickly; or that it makes up the body of the following iPod Shuffle, as cartoonishly tiny as that’s certain to be. These products will, if Liquidmetal’s various boosters are to be believed, be the type of subtle improvements on their predecessors that we usually take with no consideration. It could be hard to notice.

What might be easier to notice is the threshold the recent material could give Apple. Remember, there was nothing wildly transformative about Apple’s unibody manufacturing process-it was just a bit of better-it made their products feel more luxurious and structurally sound. It provided a distinctive look. Maybe it made them harder; it’s hard to truly know. In spite of everything, this collection of subtle differences came to define the company’s laptop line, and shrewdly, Apple patented the hell out it. If-when-Liquidmetal oozes its way into a higher generation of Apple products, you could not have the ability to point to it, but you’ll understand it’s there.

Imagery by Sam Spratt. Take a look at Sam’s portfolio and become keen on his Facebook Artist’s Page.

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This post is tagged: Explains, Giz, LiquidMetal