From Machine Design:
Have Researchers Created the Most Wear-resistant Metal Ever?
Sandia material scientists have created a platinum-gold alloy believed to be the most wear-resistant metal in the world. It’s 100 times more durable than high-strength steel, making it the first alloy to get into the same class as diamond sand sapphires, nature’s most wear-resistant materials. During development, the team also uncovered a fundamental modification that can be made to some alloys that imparts a tremendous increase in performance.
Although metals are typically thought of as strong, when they repeatedly rub against other metals, like in an engine, they wear down, deform, and corrode unless they have a protective barrier, like additives in motor oil. In electronics, moving metal-to-metal contacts receive similar protections with outer layers of gold or other precious metal alloys. But these coatings are expensive. And eventually they wear out as connections press and slide across each other day after day, year after year, sometimes millions (or even billions) of times. These effects are exacerbated with smaller connections because the less material you start with, the less wear-and-tear a connection can endure before it no longer works.
The ultradurable Sandia coating could save the electronics industry more than $100 million a year in materials alone, and make electronics of all sizes and across many industries more cost-effective, long-lasting, and dependable, from aerospace systems and wind turbines to microelectronics for cell phones and radar systems. A hypothetical (and unrealistic) example which shows the new alloy’s wear resistance is that if you put a a set of alloy tires on a car, they would lose only a single layer of atoms after skidding a mile.
Emphasis mine - much more at the site. This is big.
Tip of the hat to The Silicon Graybeard for the link.
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