Metallic glass (met glass) transformer sheet production

Dave Hill's Conway, SC plant. Half-million-degrees-per-second cooling on copper rolls. Intended for transformer cores; off-spec product sold as anti-shoplifting tags.

Met glass. Dave Hill talked about met glass. [Tom holds up a sheet of met glass.] Here's a sheet of met glass made in his plant that he commissioned down in Conway, South Carolina. It was basically on a big copper roll, and the physics of squirting a very thin layer of fluid against these copper rolls and solidifying this at about half a million degrees per second to make a metallic glass was able to produce this. This was to go in electrical transformers. It wasn't what they did initially. The first application — anybody ever remember going to a video store where you got videotapes, and they had — you still see this on certain high-value items like cell phones, they put this little plastic thing on there, and if you walk through the metal detectors in the store it'll send off a beep? That glass, the only material in the world with that low a magnetic susceptibility — you can't counterfeit a little piece of that strip. In one of those little plastic things, you take it apart after you get home, it's got a little piece of met glass in it. That's what kept Allied Signal's met glass division going for the first two or three years, because they couldn't make good production quality transformer sheet, and they sold little strips to deter shoplifters. They still do the off-age product.

$40M South Carolina plant. 10× lower magnetic losses than oriented silicon iron, but 5× more expensive. Provoked steel industry to improve silicon iron after 40 years of stagnation.

One of them gets a little bit of an advantage by some new processing productivity improvement, and the others will spend tens of millions of dollars to improve things a little bit more. Why? Because you're talking billion-dollar businesses. Just because someone in one area where you have lots of different products that compete gets a slight advantage over someone else, the other people don't want to just die and go away. They want to compete, and they'll invest more money. That's what happened in transformer steels. For motors we used to use just carbon steel, and then we got better in the 1940s and 1950s and had oriented silicon iron steels that had lower magnetic losses. Then someone discovered Metglas foil, an amorphous metal foil, which had the lowest magnetic losses of any material in the world. They built a 40-million-dollar plant down in South Carolina to make this stuff. But the steel companies that were making the silicon iron for the transformers for the utilities decided not to give up that business. Even though the Metglas foil had ten times lower magnetic losses, it was like five times more expensive. They improved their silicon iron that they had not really improved on for about forty years, so now the two are in competition again. Continual competition, continual improvement in properties, mostly driven by what the market requires.

the manufacturing engineering side of the amorphous metals case — the sessile-drop two-surface ribbon-casting process and its eventual $250M Japanese-dominated market.

So someone had to figure out how to create amorphous metals in a form that was low cost. The fellow who did this was a really bright guy. He basically said, if I could take the splat metal, that little nodule that was floating in space magnetically levitated, I could somehow stabilize it, and if I could somehow pull it away fast enough by winding it up, I could make amorphous metal in a sheet or a ribbon. What he did was to basically propose the concept of using two surfaces very close to each other, one very cold or refrigerated, another with a nozzle of a small slit, and making what amounted to a sessile drop supported by these two surfaces on a wheel, and ripping this stuff off and winding it up. And long story short, ten years and a hundred million dollars later, people figured out how to do that.