MSE_F2017_02

You okay there? How about you Tom, you ready? So we've been talking about externalities and there's a couple of them that I didn't finish up, and one of them is regulatory externalities. Remember, externalities are the things that we have to do as part of today's environment for engineering. You can be the greatest technical person in the world, but you're gonna find that you're limited and you have constraints placed upon you by society in a whole number of areas that we talked about. Some the other day, one is regulatory.

We've got pictures here of solar cells and wind turbines. Could have a picture of hydroelectric power. Essentially a number of states in the United States and parts of Canada have regulated that by 2025 or some date they will have twenty or twenty-five percent of all their electricity generated by renewable energy. And this is because of people's concerns about global warming and whatnot. Well, it turns out, this is an example of wind turbines. For example, in Texas they have a tremendous amount of wind. They've been talking about the wind coming through Texas with Hurricane Harvey and whatnot, but in West Texas it's nice and flat and they got wind. In fact, Oklahoma just north of Texas was known for all the wind they had as a constant source of energy essentially blowing through.

And so it turns out Texas passed a law like this, and essentially American Electric Power has gone in and spent $1.2 billion building wind turbines. Okay, they have not yet built the transmission lines that are going to carry the wind turbines to Austin and Dallas and stuff, because nobody in West Texas — so the cows don't need that much electricity, okay, it's just ranch land and stuff. We have solar power. You drive down the highway, the interstates now, and you'll pass these big solar panels. I have ten kilowatts of solar power on my roof now, then I redid my roof this year. And what this does, aside from improved global warming, it also raises everybody's electricity rates by about fifty percent, okay. So we can legislate and regulate and say that we're going to have more environmental, environmentally friendly sources of energy, but it turns out it costs money.

Another type of externality is intellectual property. And the story I have here on intellectual property is that General Electric patented a nickel-base superalloy called GTD 111 in the mid-1970s, and it became part of a lot of their land-based turbines. In some cases it's part of aircraft turbine engines and whatnot. But starting in the 1980s, as the patent was — or 90s, as the patent was expiring — other people realized this was a good alloy, had good high-temperature properties, and they started designing it into their engines. So far as that goes.

The problem became that in around 1980 General Electric applied for a patent on the heat treatment of this alloy. This is a successor patent. And it turns out that the Patent Office kept refusing it for almost twenty years, but GE's attorneys were persistent. They'd keep on rewriting it, and finally in the late 1990s the Patent Office issues this patent twenty years after it had been applied for. And everybody else had thought this was a public domain alloy. They had designed it into their system, and all of a sudden General Electric reigns the rights, okay, for another twenty years. So it is a big scurry to find replacements or to develop ways around the patent, because General Electric was gonna gouge people on their patent rights.

So another one, this actually came to me from a student who took this class three years ago. She had worked for an oil company down in Houston one summer, and there was another — there was a project they wanted to do, an oil country project, that had very corrosive crude oil. And they were trying to decide whether they could use carbon steel or clad steel, and was the clad steel required for corrosion resistance. Well, it turns out the technical decision was the carbon steel would corrode too quickly and you really needed to have clad steel pipe. But the country where they were going to do this — and she never told me the actual country — but basically required offsets. And offsets on major projects are because these countries would like to create jobs within their country.

Boeing faces this all the time. Airbus faces this all the time. Some country in Africa or South America wants to buy a commercial aircraft and they'll say, well, we will buy $3 billion worth of airplanes, but we want five percent of the work to be done within our country. Well, there's only so much that Boeing can give out. Certain things like the wings are pretty critical and Boeing wants to keep those right here in the United States for various reasons. But it's not so bad when Japan buys $10 billion worth of aircraft, because there's plenty of high-tech companies in Japan that can build fuselage parts and stuff for Boeing. But in some of these other countries it becomes a problem.

And turns out this particular country required a certain percentage of all the workers be in that country. Well, that's not too bad because you can go in and train welders on pipelines and stuff. It also required employment of other local workers, and the managers had — could not get visas, by law, in this country, because they had to have fifteen years of experience to be able to come in and be a manager, because this country wanted to have good jobs, not just the hourly worker jobs. The result was: project requires clad pipe, that's the technical decision; the management decision was, cancel the project, because they couldn't get the people to do the job into the country because of the regulations that were there. So the country had passed these laws hoping to increase the quality of employment, and what they did is they lost a multi-billion-dollar project and all kinds of tax revenue because they formed regulations.

We talked about Rhodesia and chrome well before. Another externality is transportation, and it might be fairly mundane. But copper tubing, like we use for water pipe, okay, in homes and whatnot — we never lost that business in the United States. It turns out all you have to have is an extrusion press that extrudes the copper, turns it into a tube, and then you draw it. It really doesn't take a very large building, the size of the Student Center would be able to produce copper tubing. But we kept this industry in the United States. There were, in the mid-1990s, there were five companies still making copper tubing in the United States, and the reason is you couldn't afford to transport all that air, okay. It just didn't — you know, you could afford to transport copper around the world as solid copper, but when you make it into ninety-five percent air, it turns out it's cheaper to just fabricate — you bring the copper from Chile to the United States and extrude it, okay. So the transportation costs kill you.

Another industry where the transportation cost kills you, and we'll see this a little bit when I get more quantitative on things, is the cement industry. I mean cement goes for $20 a ton, so you can't afford to transport it very far, and so there's cement kilns all over the world. And that goes for some other industries. Another transportation externality, although you could call it an energy externality, is what the British brought over here in the 1600s to North America. They were having an energy crisis in Britain, and the energy crisis was the fact that they were tearing down all the forests in England for three things. One is the need of the big trees to make ships, you know, with the big masts and things like the Constitution and stuff — this is the 1616, the 1600s, seventeenth century. And the other thing is they needed to make charcoal to make iron, and they needed that for military reasons too, the gun bed — cannon barrels and cannonballs and whatnot and other utensils and stuff. The other thing that came along was glass, and we'll talk about glass a little bit later in the course.

But so what were two of the things that they brought over very quickly? Because let's remember what was — Plymouth Rock was, I remember — Jamestown was 1607 and Plymouth Plantation was like 1612 or something. Well, by the 1630s, both of them — Jamestown, Virginia had a glassworks. And there's a recreation, you can go down to Jamestown, Virginia and you'll see a glass slab very similar to what we have in the basement of Building 4 here, but it's kind of old time. You go up here to Saugus, Massachusetts, you'll find an ironworks, and this was the first iron work in the United States. And they came to both these places because we had trees. And it was an energy crisis, transportation crisis, they were having fuel problems in England, and so the first industries they brought over here were the industries that consumed wood, okay. So that's the end of externalities.

Let's talk a little bit about cost and availability. And so Professor Sadoway used to tell me jokes from the Soviet Union or the Ukraine — as Ukraine. And here's one: someone goes into a store in the Ukraine and says, how much is that doll on the shelf? And the guy says 500 rubles. And he says, well, the store next door is out of stock but they have it for only 300 rubles. And the guy says, we'll come back when we're out of stock and you can have it for 300 rubles.

Cost is important. And I remember there's a faculty member in this department who's very well-known as an entrepreneur, who started a number of companies. And I remember twenty-five years ago walking across campus with him, we were walking right past the Great Sail, and he said, did you read Joel Clark's article in Journal of Metals this month? I said, yeah. He says, why, I never thought about it before, but cost really is important, isn't it? Okay, well this is when this guy was an associate professor. Now he's supposedly the great guru, one of the great gurus of MIT in starting new businesses. I think he's learned that cost is really important. But the point is, most faculty don't have a clue about what something costs.

And so I'm going to get quantitative here about the costs of various materials that we might want to select. So this is a plot from Michael Ashby that he put together about 1980 or so, and it's materials usage over time. It's a very nonlinear plot, from 10,000 BC up to 1000 BC to 1000 AD to 1940, 1960, you know, up to 2020. He's now got it in color. And he puts across the top: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Age of Steel, polymers, molecular engineering. Of course he was predicting future here. It's very difficult to predict the future, especially — prediction is very difficult, especially it involves the future, okay, is what Niels Bohr said. But they had metals, polymers, composites, and ceramics and glasses back in the Stone Age. Only the polymers and elastomers were wood and skins and fibers from plants, and composites were straw and brick, and ceramics were stone and pottery, and metals were gold or copper. Then we got more and more sophisticated and more detailed in our materials development.

And when he wrote all this, metals were sort of peaking in terms of importance in the 1980s, but he was predicting a decline. This is actually a decline in metals, and then a great expansion in some of these other things, particularly ceramics and glasses. These predictions were wrong, okay. And anyone who knew anything about the properties of materials would realize they were going to be wrong, and we're going to talk about some of those. Some of those properties have to do with the cost and availability.

So far as native availability, this is a plot of the elements in the periodic table as they are found in the Earth's crust as a fraction of a million silicon atoms. So here's silicon right here at a million silicon atoms. It's basically one of the highest. Successive — as the atomic number — these are basically rock-forming elements here. A lot of the things — well, actually aluminum and iron are two of the metals we use, copper and zinc, zirconium. Here are the rare earths. The rare earths are actually not so rare. They're at about a tenth of a percent of the volume of silicon or iron in the earth, but that's still quite a bit, and a lot more than the precious metals. The rarest metals — it says the rarest metals here, but in fact there are three metals that are even more rare. Anybody know what they are on the periodic table? They're the three that don't really exist on earth, okay. Well, you could take the transuranic elements, but polonium, which is extremely rare, and is actually a byproduct of a nuclear reaction of another element, I can't remember which one; francium, which is the same thing; and technetium, which has only been seen in the stars but is used every day in hospitals.

In fact, I had — I think I mentioned the other day, about two weeks ago I had a technetium study of my heart. I went to Mount Auburn Hospital and they injected me with technetium-99, with a half-life of — 99 — about ten hours. And I was just glowing, okay. And they could take a picture, a radiograph of me glowing in my heart pumping and things like that, okay. But technetium and polonium and francium would be down off the chart at the bottom of this thing.

If we look at the percentage, oxygen is the most abundant in the Earth's crust. It obviously is not the most abundant in the atmosphere, it's nitrogen, but it's the second most abundant in the atmosphere. But this is in the Earth's crust, the solid. Silicon is second, and the two of these compose about sixty-five percent — no, seventy-five percent of the Earth's crust. Aluminum is very abundant and in lots of things, as iron, and you see these things start dropping very quickly. And therefore in all kinds of forms of oxides and sulfides, which leads us, not in this course but in some other modules, into the corrosion of metals, which is one of their Achilles heels.

Now, this is a plot that I've redone, but this is the old one. This is the original one from a proprietary 1960 General Electric report done by a graduate of this department, Burt Westwood, who looked at the pounds per year versus the dollars per pound of structural materials. And it turns out stone is way up here, it's the most widely used. Cement back then in 1960 was the most widely used. Carbon steel was actually ahead of cement, it's no longer. Wood. So those are what I call the billion-ton-per-year club. They weren't quite a billion tons fifty years ago, but they are now, and we'll see that later. And you go all the way down here and you get diamond, which is a structural material. It's not exactly something we use in large size, but it's a structural material because we use it for grinding and cutting, and we're using it for its mechanical properties, okay — hardness and wear resistance.

The interesting thing to me when I looked at this is, these dotted lines are the iso-market-size lines, and they have a shallower slope than the usage. And that means that if I could cut the material price by a factor of two, I will double the volume of material used. In the long run — that may not be true in the short run of five or ten years, but over ten or twenty years, if I could cut the price of one of these materials by a factor of two, the market volume will increase by a factor of four based on these slopes. And so I will double my market size if I can reduce the cost of production of a material, okay. That's a long-term trend, and this plot still applies. I had it redone — I haven't had the plot completely redone, but anyway.

If you want to look at today, the big cost driver is energy. If I went back to the 1880s, what was the material that drove the world's economy from the 1880s to about 1960? Steel. Andrew Carnegie was richer than Bill Gates back in 1880 in constant dollars, and he made it all in the steel industry, because it was the Industrial Revolution. They were starting to build steel ships, they were building railroads — railroad was actually the big industry — and then along in 1900 comes the automobile. Steel basically was the commodity.

And you don't remember it, but I remember as a child, in about 1962 I think it was, President Kennedy stood down US — US Steel wanted to raise the price of steel by ten percent, and he said no. President of the United States told the company. I need a heavier authority to do that, other than the moral authority, it was the President of the United States. And people back then used to respect the President of the United States. That doesn't exist anymore but, because of some of the presidents we've had since. But nonetheless, it was a big showdown, was US Steel going to back down. US Steel said they needed a price increase because the cost of digging coal out of the ground and iron ore and everything was going up. And he said it will cause worldwide inflation if you had a ten percent increase in the price of steel. And in fact US Steel backed down, didn't raise the price of steel, and they claim that that's what destroyed the steel industry.

I happen to have worked in the steel industry, and I will tell you that's not what destroyed the steel industry. Maybe they weren't as profitable as they wanted to be, but what destroyed it was bad management, okay. For example, after World War II, the United States controlled seventy-five percent of the world's steel industry. Do you know why? They bombed out the rest. It's a wonderful thing to go to war and have bombed out your competition, okay. In the marketplace you can become the best in the world. And they had that attitude. When I went to work for him [them] in 1974, they still had the attitude that they controlled seventy-five percent of the world's steel market. At that time they controlled twenty-five percent. Today they control twenty-five — ten percent or less, actually it's less now.

But in any case, today, after 1973 and the Arab oil embargo, the world economy is denominated in oil, or energy. And it's not just oil anymore, because there's other forms of energy that we have, but basically the energy is what determines the price of most materials. When I went to — well, later I will talk about, if we do that part of this course, talked about originally about the time of Saugus Ironworks, ninety or ninety-five percent of all the cost of cast iron was basically the labor, okay. It took about four thousand hours, four person-years per ton, okay, to make steel or make iron. Today it takes twenty minutes, okay. And if that ironworker, steelworker is making the equivalent, with taxes and everything, of $80 an hour — not that he takes home $80, but if that's what it costs to employ him — in twenty minutes it's one third of that. So we're talking about $25 a ton is labor, and the rest of it is raw materials.

In the mid-1970s, when I worked for a steel company, it was 50/50. At Bethlehem Steel it was forty-five percent labor, forty-five percent raw materials, and ten percent profit, okay. So just in a very short period of time, over 400 years, it's gone from ninety-five percent labor to 1975 is fifty percent labor. Today it's down to about ten percent labor, and most of it is raw materials. And the price of a ton of steel today is less in constant dollars than it was in 1975. But a lot of this is due to the energy density.

And if we look at the energy density — apologize for the size of the lettering here, but this — lithium-ion batteries, we hear everything about, okay. This is megajoules per kilogram, or megajoules per liter, in volume or weight. And lithium-ion batteries bite the dust down here compared to other things. Chemical energy, such as coal, anthracite, okay, or plastics, if you burn them — oil have much higher energy densities. And if I — it's got liquefied natural gas, it's got kerosene and gasoline, okay. So here's your chemical energy. And now you know why automobiles have traditionally not been electric vehicles. You had a much higher energy density with gasoline, chemical energy, than you did with electrical energy.

President Obama, when he became president ten years ago, said, we're gonna have a hydrogen economy and people will be driving vehicles that will be environmentally safe because they'll burn hydrogen with oxygen and produce water vapor, okay. Great idea, Barack, but how you gonna do it, okay. Little technology problem there. One of the problems is, how do you store the hydrogen, okay? And they have given away hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out a way. And this is hydrogen, it's 700 bar pressure, 3500 psi, and they look at things that are even bigger than that. So you want to be in a car that has a pressure vessel full of hydrogen at 5000 psi, and you get in a wreck and if it reach[es] — all of a sudden you got a big fireball, plus you've got a big boom, okay. You might survive the crash, but you want to survive the explosion or the fire, okay. So there's a little problem there, okay.

It turns out there's a student who's defending his thesis over in mechanical engineering on Friday, where he's been basically taking aluminum — because everyone knew that aluminum was way up here in energy density — and the aluminum basically can generate hydrogen. He basically takes little aluminum spheres, ball bearings, and he treats them with a gallium-indium — gallium alloy at about two or three tenths of a percent. He treats them a certain way and he drops them in water, and within ten or twenty seconds they all convert to hydrogen and oxygen, just by corrosion, very rapid corrosion process.

So people for years have called aluminum canned electricity. When the former Soviet Union broke up in the 1980s, they had tremendous hydroelectric capacity in Siberia, and that's where they would produce their aluminum. And they needed foreign exchange, and which they would basically generate the electricity in Siberia, couldn't get it out of Siberia unless they made aluminum. And they started dumping aluminum on the world market for half the price that Alcoa and other people made it, because that was the only way they could transport it out, okay.

So if we start looking at energy content in megajoules per kilogram, we find aluminum is way up above most other things. Your plastics, which you can think of crude oil if you want, is of less than half — anywhere from twenty-five percent to fifty percent of the energy content of aluminum metal. And by the way, aluminum metal too, if you want to have a hydrogen-fueled vehicle, rather than pump hydrogen into some pressure vessel on the car that could explode in a crash, if all you have to do is go to the filling station, pick up some aluminum ball bearings and some water, and then mix them together later as you need them, dropping ball bearings into the water to generate hydrogen, that's a lot safer.

In fact, I remember when Obama came out with the announcement that we were going to have a hydrogen-fueled economy and people were talking about, you'd go to the filling station and you pick up your hydrogen, I thought, gonna be a lot of burned people. Anyone ever seen a hydrogen flame? What's it look like? It's invisible. What's burning? It burns to H2O. And the thing that makes a flame orange — what makes the flame orange or yellow? The little unburned soot particles in the flame, okay. Hot steam doesn't have any — I mean, you might distort the air a little bit. But if you go to a refinery where they use hydrogen all the time, people have walked through leaks where you have a hydrogen leak that catches fire, and they just walk through it because they didn't even know it was there. It's invisible. And I thought, boy, this will be great, people filling up their cars at filling stations where you can have leaks and flames, and people just walking through them.

Anyway, so anyway, aluminum has a very high energy density and it could be a good way of storing fuel for a hydrogen economy if you wanted to have it. Steel is one-fifth of aluminum, and that is essentially the price differential between steel and aluminum. I told you energy is the big driver. Well, it works out that steel goes for about fifty cents a pound — or forty cents a pound — and aluminum goes for about $2 a pound.

Student: [question about conversion efficiency]

Johnny's getting — no, over ninety percent conversion, okay. But that, you're right, your efficiency of converting the aluminum to whatever other fuel is an important criteria. But he's got — his energy content of the hydrogen, he loses ten percent in the chemical reaction and stuff, so it's still pretty good. Oil is down here, okay, same prices, basically, per kilogram. Coal, cast iron, glass, cement, wood, and stone. I don't know if you remember, but I told you the billion-ton-per-year club was stone, wood, cement, and steel. Well it turns out the least expensive materials are the materials that use the least energy, except for steel. And steel has about ten to fifty times the properties of stone or wood in terms of mechanical properties as a structural material, so we can afford to pay more for steel because it has better properties. But these are the only ones. And so it turns out what drives the usage of material, the number one thing folks, is cost, okay.

Student: [question about recycling]

Yeah, we recycle. That's the energy to reprocess. So if I want to take aluminum cans and turn them into automotive body sheet, it takes 15 megajoules per ton, whereas to get it from aluminum oxide takes 250, okay. And so steel, it takes twenty percent of — if you start with virgin iron ore and limestone and coal, [versus] recycle it, remelt it, twenty percent of that, because you've already gotten the oxygen out, okay. So the recycled number — here, and by the way this is something I produced, I couldn't find anything like this in the literature, but the numbers are real. I mean, I spent a lot of time going out to get these numbers.

So we can look at strength versus energy content of a material, and we're talking about structural materials, okay. Energy content is the same as cost, I hopefully I just explained that to you. Here's the strength. And this is what's called an Ashby plot today, after Michael Ashby, who was a professor at Harvard — now he's at, gone back to England, and he's retired, but he's making a lot of money because he came up with this. He wrote these excellent books on material selection, and he has a company that sells software program Granta that you can buy for $30,000 that will help select materials for you. It's not all that great, folks, okay. It will select them, but what it doesn't put in — artificial intelligence is not there yet, okay, to be able to really select the right material. They still need to hire a consultant like me. I'm already, hey.

So this is the energy versus the strength, and you can see the metals out here. You want to be way out here, high strength — oh, I'm sorry, this is embodied energy, so actually you really want to be over this side. You want to be high strength, you'd like to be over here, okay, in this quadrant. Metals are expensive but they have high strength. Bamboo is this wonderful material, okay, some of the natural materials are actually getting to be the lowest cost and the highest strength. Stone and brick are very low cost but very low strength. And there's all your other materials.

Turns out Ashby's plots on lots of different material properties show that most materials go over about six orders of magnitude if you take all the materials, structural materials in the world, okay. If you want to look at another thing like thermal conductivity versus resistivity, this one actually goes over about almost seven orders of magnitude. But in any case, your metals are way over here, your polymers are way down here, glasses are over here. So an Ashby plot, this is like a 50,000-foot view of material selection, which is why the Granta program doesn't really work for detailed things. You want to be a little more accurate than ten or twenty percent of the best material, particularly since it's your whole economy or whatever is gonna be based on picking the lowest-cost material. And just being eighty percent correct is not good enough. But nonetheless, the Ashby plots really do help place different classes of materials. And when we get to strength and toughness, which we will later, you're gonna see why some materials are the materials of choice, and which are the materials of choice for structural materials.

I mentioned this a couple of times now. Again, this is my numbers. I researched this within — these numbers are from the last year. But the stone manufacturers say it's fifty-three billion tons. I rounded off to fifty. Engineered wood products, the people who make engineered wood products, that association says they sell three and a half billion tons. That's not all the wood in the world. All the wood in the world is probably another fifty billion tons, but most of the wood is not engineered wood products for structural beams. Most of it is going into burning and heating homes in the third world and stuff, okay. Concrete has passed steel, it's 2.2 billion tons. And that's actually the cement. The concrete itself, with all the stone in it, is actually about double that, fifty percent of the way to stone. So some of that stone goes in here, but it's a small fraction of the stone. If you want to talk real concrete, I should probably change that to cement, the binder that's made from the calcium carbonate and other things. It's 2.2 billion tons. As recently as ten or fifteen years ago, that was about two-thirds of steel. It was around 600 million tons, and it has been growing rapidly as the third world becomes more wealthy. They really can't afford steel buildings, they can build concrete buildings.

And steel continues to grow on a steady slope of about two and a half percent a year around the world, and it's at one and a half billion tons. And I think I mentioned to you, the next structural material could be plastics at 300 million tons. But if I'm talking metals, it's aluminum at 45 million tons, okay. It's hardly in the running. Ninety-five pounds of every hundred pounds of metal made in the world is steel. And students get tired of my saying that, but steel is an important material, but it's only important because the economics drive it as well as properties, okay, the strength and toughness of steel. But there is a reason why steel is so big, and there's a reason why Andrew Carnegie was the richest person in the world at his time.

If we start looking at tons per year of a lot of different materials, you can go to the US Geological Survey and they do their little annual review of different materials. There's a lot more than just these but these give you some of the numbers. This is all plastics, anywhere from polyethylene to high-performance aerospace plastics. You lump them all together and they're still only twenty percent of steel. Although as my old thesis advisor used to say, in volume they're approximately equal, okay. Is that what you're going to say?

Student: [question, inaudible]

Well, hold on, because one of steel's Achilles heels is it's too heavy, okay. We're gonna get to that, okay. But this — that's this measure. I have another metric coming up, okay, which is dollars per ton, okay. But I put plastics in here with a bunch of metals. Turns out iridium — if you went back to that abundance in Earth's crust, iridium is one of the — except for polonium, francium, and technetium, iridium is the least abundant metal in the world's crust, which is why I made my wife's engagement ring out of eighty percent platinum, twenty iridium. Actually that's not the reason. Of it — actually it is part of the reason.

So if we look at dollars per ton, you start seeing some other things. But it turns out steel still leads the list on dollars per ton. Plastics are more expensive, but plastics still have advantage, I'm not — and we'll get to the other properties. Aluminum is four times the price because it's got four times the energy content. Plastics are considerably higher because they have about five times the energy content, just as for the crude oil value, okay. If you just burn them you're gonna get that much energy. Copper is not found in very rich ores anymore, and so there's a lot of getting around the entropy problem of concentrating the copper. And you come down here, and some things like nickel-based superalloys, they're fantastic mechanical properties, but they're kind of pricey. Same thing with titanium, although it doesn't always have such fantastic mechanical properties. Neodymium, which is essential in some of our functional magnets. Gold, way overpriced, okay, but they'll pay you good rupees in India for gold. Iridium at $17 million a ton.

Scandium is kind of interesting, $4 million a ton, and there's only about 2000 tons a year. And here is one of the largest, if not — well, I don't know if it's the largest use of scandium. It says right here, scandium alloy, 100 ksi aluminum, thirty percent stronger than what goes in the Boeing aircraft wing, okay. And it turns out that there's a lot of money in baseball bats, okay. And that's why, if you add two tenths of a percent scandium to an aluminum alloy, you just doubled the price of the aluminum alloy. Because you're paying — what is it, scandium, $4 million a ton, which is — twenty? How much is that? That's two thousand — and two thousand dollars a pound, okay. So you start figuring out the cost of aluminum alloys with scandium. But it turns out scandium refines the grain size like nothing else. The Soviets tried this. They weren't worried about economics thirty years ago, and they showed that scandium can really improve the properties of aluminum alloys. And so it turns out people are looking to see if they can drop the price of scandium, because it's not a rare element. There's a lot of it out there in the world. It's sort of dispersed, you got the entropy problem. But some of the Japanese companies, one of them — which a — well, I'll tell you, Sumitomo — was announced as they will produce a hundred tons of scandium oxide a year. That's what they've announced, and they actually are probably going to produce a lot more than that from some of the other proceeds that they have. And so people are looking at this to be able to increase the strength of aluminum in automobiles. But you can't just double the price — we're going to get into that — of an automobile lightly.

So a relative cost and density. Now this is where, I don't know, I didn't put the plastic on here, but the plastic would show up very well here if we had a relative cost and relative density. And you look at some of these things. People say, well, use titanium or use cobalt alloys or nickel alloys. Well, these things are a little pricey compared to the workhorse materials of steel and aluminum. And I always thought this was interesting: the price of copper, if it's $10 a pound order of magnitude, silver's about $1000 a pound, and gold is about $100,000 a pound. Just go up by an order of a hundred each time between copper, silver, and gold, just going down the periodic table.

Student: [question about gold-plated connectors]

First of all, it's plated nickel, it's not solid nickel. They're putting a nickel flash on there. And the reason is, nickel electroplates better than any other metal in the world. And so if you want to get a good gold plate, you put a nickel flash underneath it, because aluminum and steel have these precipitates and carbides and things — you can lay down pure nickel, it's a beautiful material to electroplate something else on top of. So now, nickel is a little bit of a problem because it can be toxic. It is toxic in the human body, and some people are actually allergic to it. I mean, I have a daughter who's even allergic to gold and platinum. She doesn't have pierced ears. She always wanted pierced ears when she was a teenager. She got pierced ears, that lasted for about two weeks, okay. And even platinum — and a lot of people, some people, can not tolerate silver, can tolerate gold, but if you can't tolerate gold, you go to platinum. And we're — my daughter, we can't even tolerate platinum, as you know, in her skin.

Student: [follow-up question, inaudible]

Oh, yeah. Yes, compared to gold it's peanuts. In fact, so we can use nickel — we often use, we can use pure nickel underlayers. We usually use brass. So we're using copper. Which — and, well, here's copper, so it's cheaper than nickel — but we use cupronickel and a lot of things, brass, and then we put gold on. In fact, Attleboro, Massachusetts is the gold capital of the world. Because in Sheffield, England, they came up with a way to braze silver to base material, brass, and they could make silverplate. And so now people could own, not sterling silver, but silverplate dinnerware and stuff, and they could pretend like they were rich, okay. But then in Attleboro, they said, oh, we can do this with gold. And it made gold-filled material. And there's a company down there used to be called Leach & Garner. And I actually started consulting with them in 1980 or 1978, I guess. And it was the sons, Phil Leach and Steve Garner, of the founders in 1899. The reason Attleboro is the gold capital of the world is because they had the mill that made all the stuff. They had — when I was there, they had three continuous casters for gold. When they went through seven tons of gold a year, okay. And that's why Attleboro is the gold capital of the world, because you're making composites. Make you stay out of metals because of the costs, for jewelry, okay.

Other questions? Okay. So strength versus relative cost. Here's an Ashby plot only over five orders of magnitude. And you can see Technical Ceramics are way — now, we have relative cost per unit volume. The Technical Ceramics are very expensive. The non-technical ceramics like concrete are very inexpensive. The metals are actually sort of here — well, actually they're all through here, but the common metals are over here at a relatively low cost, but not necessarily the highest strengths so far as that goes. But it [gives] you the ballpark of what's available in the world, okay.

Now, another thing — this is again one of the things that I came up with, now, other people had done some of these things but I sort of integrated all this stuff to say value of weight saved over the life of a vehicle. If we're talking an automobile, if you talk about $2 or $4 a gallon gasoline and you talk about an automobile goes a hundred thousand miles, you'll save $2 per pound for like a 3500-pound vehicle. And there's plenty of data to support that. If you go to ship or rail, it's a factor of ten cheaper, and the typical lifetime of the ships or the railroad cars is about thirty years, okay. But you always save twenty cents a pound because they roll or they float and doesn't take a lot of energy to move them. Aircraft, it's about $200 a pound over a hundred thousand hours. Typical commercial jetliner will run for about a hundred thousand hours before they decide the maintenance costs are getting too steep, and you just go out and buy a new one that's more energy efficient and everything. Spacecraft, we talked about this, about $20,000 a pound for payload in orbit, okay.

You have to know what industry you're talking about if you're talking about selection of materials. And most of the materials scientists have no clue. Actually they do have a clue, they just don't want to tell you, okay. They think everybody's gonna — they're gonna sell all their material into the spacecraft industry. Well that's ridiculous, okay. Or they think everything's going to go into the automotive industry. Well it turns out, if you take that $2 a pound or 20 cents a pound in ship or rail, with fifty hundred — ships made in the United States, or 7,570,000 rail cars, you're talking two industries of $20 billion each. If you talk aircraft you're talking about 150 billion. Now Boeing actually is about one third of that in the United States, but there are other people like Bombardier or Learjet or various others, okay, that use aluminum in aircraft. The spacecraft industry, they only make about a hundred satellites a year, folks. And they may be fairly expensive satellites, they may cost a couple hundred million dollars apiece, but that's only a twenty-billion-dollar market. The reason everybody wants to get into the automotive business: this is the Walmart of materials, okay. This is the big volume. 30 million vehicles, 600 billion a year. That's just the United States, that's not world. If you want world numbers on these, multiply each one of these columns by three. The US is about one third of the world economy. So the sweet spot is automotive. A lot of people shoot for automotive and they shoot for it with something that's just too expensive.

If you start looking over time in the US economic sector, in the 1800s — this is a nonlinear time — in the 1800s, ninety-five percent of the workforce was involved in agriculture, just trying to feed themselves. And then you had some small amount of industry. This was kind of artisans, of blacksmiths and coopers and potters and things like that. And right at the top here, there's a little bit of service sector and whatnot, or the government. The 1850s, you start seeing the Industrial Revolution, that's this red stuff, which is now decreasing as we basically become more and more productive and need fewer and fewer people to produce even more goods than we did before. The service sector is huge. The government sector is exploding in size. And so we have had a tremendous — just in a generation or two generations — we've had a tremendous displacement. This may not be disruptive technology, if you know Clayton Christensen's book, but it's certainly disruptive in the entire industry.

If I start looking at where the money goes for a fabricated structural — materials scientists don't admit it, but only ten to twenty percent of the cost goes into the material. The vast majority of — so if I'm talking about an automobile, it's gonna sell for $25,000, it turns out the materials cost is only going to be about $2,500 to $5,000 max that goes into that $25,000 car. Most of it goes into design and engineering, or the biggest fraction is in fabrication: sheet metal stamping, joining, forging, machining, all those manufacturing processes. Or if you want to throw in there nondestructive testing and quality control, is equal to the materials cost. If I was Lee Iacocca, I'd tell you that health insurance is $5,000 of every car, okay, for the auto workers. General administrative is about ten percent, and profit, if you add all these up, is anywhere from losing ten percent to gaining ten percent profit. But if you take these types of numbers and you say, okay, the value of a pound saved in an automobile is $2 a pound, ten percent of that as a material cost is 20 cents a pound, okay. And I'll get to all that in a second, but it turns out there's only a few materials that you can use at these levels.

If I start looking at material cost as a fraction of the total cost — automobiles and aircraft, which is 750 billion dollars of our manufacturing products that we were talking about, the vast majority, it's about ten percent is the material cost. The two industries that I know of that have the highest material cost as a fraction of the product you're going to build are stationary things: pipelines that get buried in the ground, or utility transmission towers. Those will pay more for material, up to thirty percent. Spacecraft, material cost is nothing. Semiconductors, it's even less, okay. So for structural materials it's about ten percent. And if I take and say, okay, if I'm going to — I have to have materials that cost no more than $2 a pound, and ten percent of that can be my material cost, my only choice is to build a ship our of steel, wood, or concrete. For an automobile it's steel. Now if I say I'm going to spend up to twenty percent of my cost on the material for this thing like an automobile, I can throw in aluminum and plastics. If I want to do aircraft, I can go for aluminum at ten percent. If I want to pay more I can add composites. Spacecraft I can certainly do composites. And if I really need something — and I do need refractory metals in spacecraft because of their low coefficients of thermal expansion and things like that — but Nature has chosen the materials based on cost and based on the savings per pound, okay.

And you notice, I know you like plastics, but plastics — they're in automobiles but they are — you're not gonna start making plastic automobiles, unless you're talking racing cars, and we've been doing that for years, okay. But those are half-million-dollar vehicles, there are million-dollar vehicles, it's not your $25,000 Ford Taurus, okay.

So maybe I'll conclude with Sprague's law. The head of materials at GE Aircraft Engines in Cincinnati for many years used to — he had a lot of great sayings. He used to — he was just a great engineer who would say it like it is, okay, and didn't worry about who he offended. "Whenever you first hear the properties of a new material, write it down, because those are the best properties the material will ever have." So all you materials scientists who think you've just invented the next world's greatest material, and you tell me how wonderful it is, well, I'll take down notes on what your properties are, because you got it once, you'll probably never see it again. And Jim Williams, who replaced Bob Sprague in that job, says, "Whenever you hear the cost of a new material, write it down, because that's the lowest cost the material will ever have," okay. So people are always very energetic, enthusiastic about their new material, but the cost and the properties of new materials never quite make what they're originally hyped up to be. So I'll see you tomorrow, and we're gonna start talking about speed versus cost in selection of material.