Wednesday, July 17, 2024

"A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything From Smartphones to Missiles"

This dawn they speak of has been a long time coming.*

From the Wall Street Journal, July 5:

Labor-intensive manufacturing has limited the use of lighter, stronger composites but that may change with emerging techniques

There have been only a handful of ages of new materials in the history of humankind—ceramics, steel and plastics come to mind—and we are now on the cusp of the next one: composites.

When we talk of composites, we’re speaking about such things as the carbon-fiber ones in wind turbines, race cars and the Boeing 787. Such materials have the advantage of being far lighter than the metal parts they typically replace, while being just as strong, and requiring fewer resources to make.

Materials scientists have had limited success making composites affordable and accessible for decades, or possibly millennia—technically, they were invented by the Mesopotamians. The labor-intensive nature of their manufacturing has made them expensive, which has limited their application to a handful of areas where their advantages outweigh their costs, such as the aerospace industry.

Now, thanks to new manufacturing techniques that can churn out composite parts quickly and cheaply, all of that is changing, and the results could be both profound and exciting.

Modern composites, starting with Bakelite, were pioneered in the early part of the 20th century. Other composites were invented at a steady pace, and the industry began to hit its stride in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when automated processes for turning things like carbon fiber into giant structures like airplane bodies and windmill blades reached maturity.

In just the past couple of years, a number of startups have developed processes for creating all sorts of small objects from composites, in a way that is fast and inexpensive. These include Berkeley, Calif.-based Arris Composites, 9T Labs in Zurich, Orbital Composites in Silicon Valley, and others.

Shifting substantial portions of what we make and use from steel and plastic to composites—which are amalgamations of a variety of fibers, embedded in a variety of plastics—could bring new kinds of transportation, more terrifying weapons of war, and lighter and more durable smartphones, wearables and other consumer electronics.

All of that is possible because composites, while they have their challenges, are often able to perform just as well as high-strength metal parts, but with a fraction of the weight. Composites are the reason modern jetliners are so fuel-efficient, and the entire wind-power industry would be impossible without enormous turbine blades made from composites.

It’s one thing to make airplanes out of composites—Boeing pioneered this technology with its 787, on which nearly every visible surface is in fact made of a carbon-fiber composite. It’s quite another to mass-produce smaller composite parts of the kind that we typically make out of titanium or other metals, such as the bolts and brackets that hold a 787 together.

As with other pioneering manufacturing technologies, such as 3-D printing, bringing composites into the mainstream is more of an evolutionary process than a revolutionary one.

Today, you can buy consumer products made with ultralight, ultrastrong parts from Arris and 9T Labs, including Brooks running shoes, spokes for bicycle wheels, and luxury watches. But what’s coming is even more interesting: Arris’s technology is being tested by Airbus to replace metal brackets inside its planes and by Singapore-based ST Engineering, which performs a substantial fraction of the repairs on airplanes in the U.S.

9T Labs is also working on aerospace applications, and by the end of the year it hopes at least one of its customers will be ready to announce bicycles made with its parts. Orbital Composites, meanwhile, has a handful of contracts with the U.S. military to develop its composites-manufacturing process for satellites, rockets, drones and hypersonic aircraft....

....MUCH MORE
*The outro from 2023's ""Material Impact announces $352m materials science fund"
Putting it simply, materials science is the future of stuff.

*****
We've been pitching materials science since 2009's "What It Takes: Building a Materials Science Company for the 21st Century".
First off, 3D printing is not dead, it's not even resting. But like nanotechnology (remember nano?) it is becoming just another wrench in the toolbox. Here's how we were viewing nanotech in 2010:
...The reason for highlighting nano is two-fold.

1) Since Feynman coined the word there has been a misconception among investors that there would be a nano-technology "industry". This has proven not to be the case and won't be in the future. Rather nano is a tool, an approach toward problem solving.

There will be some breakthroughs that make their discoverers instantly (after 10 years of research) wealthy but the real beneficiaries will be companies like Kyocera and 3M and Siemens. They will use the technology to do what they are already doing, just better, faster, cheaper, more.

2) In spite of the fact that there will be few pure plays we are convinced that nano combined with advances in materials science and manufacturing technology is what will spur the next secular bull market....
When it becomes ubiquitous, the distinctions blur, the drive for creativity recedes, stasis, then death.
Wait what? Entropy! I meant to co-opt the physically precise  concept of entropy to metaphorically describe the trend. Not death.
No, death bad, Sand Hill Road good.

And today's story, from CB Insights...

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