SMS_S2016_06

Schedule for the rest of this week is, I'll be lecturing three days, Dr. Belmar will be here on Thursday, and I'm not sure about this week after that. That's why I've got question marks everywhere. I've got to be out of town on two of these days, so we'll find out, and I'll try to get that straight down with him before tomorrow to let you know what's happening next week. Although, if he's going to do eight lectures and I do twelve or thirteen, we will probably be done by the end of February with live lectures, and then of course you have all the canned lectures you could ever want, okay.

With regard to things that we've talked about in the past, we talked about last time, we talked about properties of structural materials vary over about ten to the fifth. If you look at all the Ashby plots, they go about five orders of magnitude, and it turns out if you look at this curve right here, they go over about a factor of a hundred thousand in cost per pound. So tremendous variability in properties, but the properties are limited. We're going to talk about that. Now there's one thing we didn't talk about on this particular plot. Remember this is Jack Westbrook's 1962 plot of structural materials going from stone, at what I estimate's about six billion tons a year, to diamond, which is considerably less in volume and weight and density anyway. But in any case, the iso-market-size lines are these dashed lines, and the usage line, or the trend, are these steeper solid lines.

And what does that mean? That means that in the long run, if I can double — or if I can cut the cost by a factor of two, I will increase the market size by a factor of four, which means a doubling of the dollar volume of the market. So long run, it's better to be productive and reduce the cost of materials. Maybe not the short run, there might be a lot of temporary things in the short run, but in the long run, over five or ten years. And why do I say the long run is five or ten years? It takes industry or society about five or ten years to make adjustments. After the 1973 Arab oil embargo, one of the problems was none of the utilities could operate without oil. They couldn't switch to natural gas or coal. But once the Arabs stuck the gun to their head economically and said we're not going to sell you oil and they were essentially out of business, they invested in the ability to, just at the flick of a switch, change oil to gas or to put in coal burning facilities in substitute for oil. So the next time the Arabs tried to do it, which was five years later, they were a lot less successful, and when they tried to do it in five years after that it was a flop, okay. Because industry had adapted over five or ten years, they were able to make the long-term investments over five to ten years. So the time scale is five or ten years in my opinion.

And I also said something that surprises a lot of people in this department when I say materials are a relatively small fraction of the product cost, typically only about ten percent. For semiconductors and some other things, material costs maybe one percent. For pipelines and transmission powers for electrical transmission, it might be thirty percent. But in general, materials are not a large fraction. It's all that erection and construction and non-destructive testing and design and all that other stuff that mechanical engineers do primarily that are the big cost of a product. And so if you pay twenty-five thousand dollars for a Ford Taurus or a Toyota Camry — or what other ones here, I throw out there so I'm not — giving a Chevy Malibu, okay, so we're going to try to be ecumenical, all the manufacturers here — it's only about twenty-five hundred dollars worth of materials.

There, what is probably the largest single item in the value of selling a twenty-five-thousand-dollar car? Lee Iacocca made this argument a number of years ago: health care. Largest single item in the cost of a new automobile is the health care for the workers, okay. Health insurance, the largest single cost. Well, actually I can't remember the largest single cost. See, the engine or the body frame is the largest cost, but the second highest cost in an automobile is the seats. And it turns out, if you do studies, people will pay a lot more for good seats in an automobile. They want to be comfortable when they get that accident, okay. And also the hardest thing to recycle in that automobile is the seats, okay. Just another factoid for you.

But in any case, one of the key points about this type of curve is that in the long run, if you can improve the productivity, you're going to get things better and better. So it's always good to pass things around — it gives you something to throw at each other. Turns out this is a bar of magnesium, one foot long, one inch in diameter. It's fairly light. This is a bar of zinc, same size, different density. Pretty dramatic, huh. Turns out the magnesium — if I had beryllium, beryllium would be almost exactly the same as magnesium, they have almost the same density. However, a bar of beryllium like that, instead of costing a couple of dollars like the magnesium or the zinc, it would cost probably tens of thousands of dollars for a bar of beryllium. Here's a piece of aluminum. Someday I should get a piece of aluminum that's of a similar size, because I probably could afford it. I did look into buying a piece of beryllium once and they wanted to charge me a thousand dollars for a little disc. It was a sixteenth of an inch thick and one inch in diameter. Anyway, this is just a piece of nickel, one foot long, higher density. This piece of titanium — I did have a piece of one-inch-thick titanium laying around from my very first research contract, I'll talk about this later. This is a nickel-base alloy, so far as that goes. So you get a feel for difference in density.

And density is very important if you're going to try to save weight. And it turns out, the faster something goes, the more important weight is. And you can see that from this type of curve, which one time I was supposed to give a talk, I couldn't go, Professor Sadoway went. But it was a talk down Washington or somewhere, so they paid to get fancy overheads done. This is thirty years ago. And so I got the overheads, but anyway, but this is my talk on the dollar of a pound saved. As automobiles, two dollars; two hundred dollars in aircraft; and twenty thousand spacecraft. However, I can throw out these rule of thumb numbers, and it's important when you hear someone talking about this wonderful new material and how it's going to change the aerospace industry. Well, okay, but it's not going to change the automotive industry because you're talking several orders of magnitude — it's not four orders of magnitude difference in cost.

However, there are things where that this little oversimplified version of cost breaks down, and that's where if we get to collateral weight savings. I'll hide some of this stuff for a second. People have been trying for years to make a jet turbine disk that does not have to have the big heavy flange and the mechanical attachment. That's what this is for. This is a nickel-base superalloy, and this one actually I have because it sort of broke, okay. But this was the land-based turbine, such as generates electric power. And you can tell by passing this thing around that most of the weight of this thing is down here in the root, okay. This is the mechanical attachment. This thing spinning around — I know this was probably only spinning around in six or seven thousand rpm, but this is a lot of centrifugal force. And it turns out the density — if we had a material that was lighter weight we would love to use it. And in fact in the compressor section where we only go to eight or nine hundred degrees centigrade, we do use titanium. But in the combustor section, the hot section of the engine, we don't use titanium. Maybe — I know why. It actually has pretty good high temperature properties, not quite as good as nickel. Well, the reason is, titanium tends to ignite above 900 degrees centigrade. It dissolves its own oxide, it no longer has the protective oxide. And there have been a number of combustor fires in a jet engine where the titanium ignited. And let me tell you, it's sort of like a sparkler going off, it is exactly the same thing as a flare, okay. We use titanium powder or aluminum powder or magnesium powder in flares to give us the big bright light. And once that fire starts, it's all over, you can't put it out. And so there were a number of fires about ten years ago in aircraft engines that were — it was a bad day for the engine, okay, when the engine ignites in that way, so far as that goes.

So anyway, a pound saved is worth a lot of money, but it depends on where it saved, okay. If you save it in the disc, has a great big flange on the outside, and the further out it is the worse it is, because this thing's spinning and centrifugal force means that there's a lot of stress on things. If you have to have a big heavy flange to make the mechanical attachment — people would love to weld the blade directly to the disc, and then you don't have to have this heavy flange and this heavy root section that makes a mechanical attachment. Plus, mechanical attachments, when you're going at those speeds, you don't want any vibration or flutter. And so they actually machine those very precisely, like two millionths of an inch tolerance. Actually have to broach them. If you know what broaching is, where you basically use a knife of a known shape and size and just cut right through it, so it's absolutely identical. It's the most expensive part of the blade making process is to make that root section strong. If you could weld the blade to the disc, you can get rid of all this extra weight that you have for the mechanical attachment. And that's called a bladed disc, or a bliss [blisk]. Now we'd love to have [blisks]. There's only one high-volume engine that I know of, it's been around for over thirty years, it's the Rolls-Royce M250, actually used to be Detroit Diesel Allison, but Rolls-Royce owns Detroit Diesel Allison now in Indianapolis. Makes this cast [blisk]. So the disc is actually cast with the blades. I'd like to get one. They've made about 50,000 of these engines or something. It's only about this big, and the blades are integrally cast to the disc. It's the only [blisk] that I know of high volume production. They'd love to make the great big disc [blisk] because they could save twenty pounds on a disc. If you save twenty pounds on the disc, and if you have ten discs in an engine, you could save two hundred pounds in the engine. If you save two hundred pounds out there on that little diving board we call the wing, you could save two thousand pounds on the airframe. So the Air Force is very interested in this, because two thousand pounds of weight savings could be either further range or more payload, right. You've got tradeoff either one: either carry more fuel for greater range, or more payload to drop on the enemy, okay.

So a pound of weight saved on that high-speed spinning disk can translate to ten times the weight. And so if the average weight of two hundred pounds saved on the airframe of an aircraft is worth two hundred dollars, then if you could save twenty pounds on a [blisk], you're actually up in the aerospace type of cost savings. So there's a principle that I came up with once at the time Sadoway was giving my talk for me, is the faster something moves, the better, or the more we'll pay for low density, okay. For equal volumes, one will pay less for less dense material, and you get about a factor of ten. Actually this is just a hyperbola, okay, where you go from relative cost of a hundred for something at density one, which is plastic, to something has a density of ten — and there your nickel, that nickel piece back there has got a density about nine, almost nine. So we don't use nickel because it's lightweight, we use it because it has good high temperature properties.

And so lightweight is important, but it's not important if the thing floats, okay. We don't really care too much about the weight of ships. I mean we do, but it's not that critical, because it's only worth twenty cents a pound for the superstructure. We don't care about great big nuclear reactors, because they're not moving, they're stationary, just a big heavy weight sitting on the ground. We do care about the weight of advanced aircraft. This is the early version of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, which is now the Osprey that the Marine Corps and Air Force and other people use. It's a tilt-rotor aircraft. This could not have been built without carbon fiber composites. You just couldn't have built it. You couldn't have designed it out of aluminum, it's too heavy for this aircraft. The whole thing is carbon fiber reinforced composite. And that's why it started out at fifteen million dollars a pop, and now they're about sixty million dollars a pop, okay, when they actually got into it, okay.

If you get to the — I passed around a piece from this — was this is an artist rendition of the X-33 space plane that was supposed to be a prototype, half-size, that was going to go into space to replace the proven design that was going to replace the space shuttle. And it — the fuel had to be lightweight fuel, and it was H2O — hydrogen tank, oxygen tank. And in fact you had to get into the design, the tanks actually are the structure here, okay. You can't afford to build a structure to give strength and then put some fuel tanks on there. The fuel tanks actually have to provide the strength for the structure in order to meet the weight requirements of this engine, okay. So it failed because — actually the reason I have that little piece, it was actually the hydrogen tanks were actually built in the same hangar at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale California where they built the first stealth — boss stealth fighter, okay. Just a little — that's actually not bad little, but it's not that big either. It's the size of about two basketball courts, but basically they had the stealth fighter, and they built this all composite stealth fighter in there. And then the space was available and they were going to build the X-33 space plane. They built the hydrogen tanks at a cost of 250 million dollars a tank, put them in service — not in service, they put them in a test with 5,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen in each one.

Anyway, there's only one place in the world, or that I know of, and that's Huntsville Alabama, NASA has a facility where they can test this and they could put liquid hydrogen into this tank and see if it worked. Well they had a bad bonding problem, and one of my other lectures, and probably the joining course, I talked about how they had adhesively bonded this and how they made a mistake. And they knew, they wanted a factor of two safety on the design, but when they found that the autoclaving of the adhesive bonded joints was not quite what they wanted, they sharpened their pencils and they said, well, a factor of 1.05 is good for a safety factor, which means it has five percent extra capability. Put it in service — or in service, they put it in test with 5,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and cooled it down, it held. And everybody's sitting there, you know, get out the champagne, we survived our test, we'll be able to fly this thing. And they start taking the hydrogen out, starts to warm up, and then goes pop, okay. And as it warmed up, it failed, okay. So 1.3 billion dollar program that was cancelled because they couldn't build it, okay.

That brings up this slide. I quote of this before, from Bob Sprague, who was head of materials for General Electric aircraft engines in Cincinnati for many years. Whenever you first hear about the properties of a new material, write it down — those are the best properties the material will ever have. He was replaced — and I quoted this one for you, this is actually Jim Williams' slide, he gave this to me once he heard me quote Bob Sprague. He calls it Sprague's first law, same thing: whenever you first hear about the material, write it down. His corollary: whenever you first hear about the price of a new material, write it down, and that's the lowest price it will ever have. So material scientists tend to oversell their materials big time, because they want you to believe they just discovered the Rosetta Stone of materials and everything will be made out of their material next year. Doesn't quite work that way.

In fact, there's an article that will be posted called "Bringing New Materials to Market." I mentioned Technology Review, and this was published — I can find it, and cannot find it — here it is, published in 1995 in Technology Review. And it talks about the fact that it takes twenty years from the first discovery of a new material to actually making it large-scale economic development, okay, large-scale production. And so that's one of the reasons people like venture capitalists don't like to invest in new materials companies, because it's a twenty year payback. And as the author of this, which was me, okay, pointed out, in 1995, if you want a return at eight percent, one dollar of profit, or twenty dollars of — what call it — if you're going to invest a dollar today — I guess it's the way I did it — if you want to invest a dollar today but not get your profit back for twenty years, at eight percent, which was at the time a typical internal rate of return that companies had for investments, you have to return twenty dollars twenty years from now, okay. That's a lot.

And because of that, there's lots of things that we just don't invest in. Anybody know how long, for a hundred years, we've had the same amount of oil reserves in the world, in terms of number of years of oil reserves? So, you might know how many years it is. We've had twenty years of oil reserves for the last hundred years. The reason is, once you have twenty years of proven reserves — you know you drilled the well, you found this big pot of oil on the ground — once you've got twenty years of reserves, you quit investing in drilling for oil, or developing a new technology for oil, because that's all you need is twenty, that's all you can afford to invest in, because you can't get a big enough return more than twenty years ahead. And so we've always had twenty years worth of oil. I remember when I was a student they were predicting we were going to run out of oil by 1990. Well, we didn't. We ran out of two-dollar-barrel oil, and the only people who have that — well, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis actually have about four-dollar-barrel oil now, this partly because of inflation, they still have it — but the rest of the world is up in the twenty-dollar-barrel range. You raise the price of something and people will start investing in it.

Same type of thing with rare earth magnets, okay. The rare earths that are used in lots of electronic things nowadays, the rare earth magnets — originally there wasn't a big market for them and there was a problem, and actually in this paper, "Bringing New Materials to Market," I use this as one of the exceptions. General Motors discovered neodymium iron boron magnets, okay. That's what these very strong rare earth magnets are. Barely pull them apart. Pass it around. And second, very brittle, you'll see someone cracked. But they discovered these rare earth magnets that had tremendous — these are not structural materials, but nonetheless I'll show you some plots of what these things do. Here's the magnetic coercivity of magnet alloys over time, and this was in it — whoops — yeah, okay, just a worn out, they get new plots. This is the BH product. B is the self magnetic field, H is the applied field, and the strength of a motor or something goes as the magnetic field squared, or the self field times the applied field. And this is what we had with Alnico magnets. Were the strong magnets when I was a kid. And then we came up with samarium cobalt, which we studied when I was an undergraduate here. We went to General Electric ASS — samarium cobalt. And they were working in the 1970s on samarium cobalt at the General Electric research, and then in 1980s General Motors came up with neodymium iron boron, which is about forty times greater than the old magnets we had years ago.

And so this is an Alnico magnet. And if you got a piece of steel — somewhere I have a piece of steel here, a welding electrode, so I'll pass around the welding electrode and you can feel how strong it is. If I know what this shape magnet is — you can buy these off Amazon — it's a cow magnet. You know, anybody know why you call it a cow magnet? Put it in a cow's mouth and hold his mouth closed and he will swallow it. She will. Thoughts wallet. And you want it in the cow's stomach, because the cows will go out there and they'll graze and they'll eat old tin cans and things like that, and it goes into destroys their stomach and their intestines and their others. But if you have something, a stainless steel magnet that will not dissolve in their stomach — the hydrochloric acid in their stomach will dissolve the steel can. So cows eat steel, not intentionally, but it's not good for them. And then pass this around, but this is a neodymium iron boron magnet, and it has about eight times the strength. You try to slide these guys apart here if you want.

And what happens is — I remember when I was your age and couldn't afford to pay to have my car repaired. Nowadays I pay a mechanic to do it, but back then I had to rebuild the starters on cars, okay. And it's sort of a pain, kind of dirty. But a starter motor weighed about fifty or sixty pounds, and a starter motor on a car today is about the size of your fist, okay. And that's because they're using neodymium iron boron magnets. In the old days they used Alnico magnets — in my old days, Alnico magnets that aren't as strong. It turns out, when the Sony Walkman came out in the early 80s, this was the great music thing, and you put your double A batteries in there that lasts for about two hours. Now you have batteries in your music will play for forty, sixteen, twenty-four hours, forty-eight hours. It's all because of neodymium iron boron magnets. The little motors that are in there essentially are run off very powerful magnets.

And if you look at the relative strength of the magnets, here's a plot of the relative strength of — here's your old Alnico magnets from the 1940s, different types of grades of Alnico. And there's a ferrite magnet, and the ceramic magnet, and then samarium cobalt, and then neodymium iron boron. And so the size of the motor scales as the strength — actually it gets the square of the strength of the magnetic field. So that's pretty impressive, okay. Not a structural material, but some of the materials properties, improvements have been very dramatic.

Here's another material property, the most dramatic I know of: the optical loss of a glass. Egyptian glass was pretty hard to see through. Phoenician glass was better. Glass got better and better. But this is decibels per kilometer. And then all of a sudden, when they got to glass fiber, and were sending laser light down across the Atlantic Ocean or Pacific Ocean, the glass fibers essentially have fantastic transmission. And it's gone up by how many orders of magnitude? A bunch — like twelve or thirteen orders of magnitude in transmissivity.

You can look at the operating temperature of jet engines. This is a plot of the operating temperature, firing temperature, of engines. These are structural materials. And back in the 1950s, a man named Whittle invented the turbine engine. He was a British engineer. Is basically in the late 30s he had this idea for a turbine engine. And now he's — I don't have the quote with me right now, but he's sort of famous for the quote that, it's a good thing that — well, the people had predicted that a turbine engine would be impossible to operate. And he basically quoted, after he had invented it and made it operate, that it is a good thing he didn't know the conventional wisdom at the time that what he was doing was impossible, because otherwise he never would have tried. But in any case, the materials they had were things like stainless steels, and then they had some nickel-based alloys, IN or 9MA, Katie — and then Mar-M is Martin Marietta, and Udimet is at General Electric, I don't remember, Rene is General Electric, IN is International Nickel, GTD-111 is kind of interesting, that big heavy turbine blade that may or may not be GTD-111, yeah.

Just, they don't oxidize, and however many hours — when I was 19 years old, between my freshman and sophomore year, I got a job working in the Naval Air Rework Facility in Norfolk Virginia rebuilding engines as an engineering student that summer. And with engines — TF30 engines were coming back from Vietnam, and we had to rebuild them and send them back to Vietnam. And the engines had 500 hours on them, that was the lifetime of an engine, 500 hours, and you had to rebuild it every 500 hours. Today 30,000 hours on a commercial engine before you have to rebuild it, okay. So it's not just operating temperature, it's operating lifetime has improved over this time in terms of oxidation resistance and other things. So that's from 1972, 1990 or so, or 1995, you're up to 30,000 hours. And we went from better and better alloys, to single crystals, single crystal turbine blades that cost six thousand dollars a blade, okay. You've got a hundred blades on a disc, okay, so six hundred thousand dollars for a replacement set of blades on one disc in one engine. That's why the engines cost five or ten million dollars, okay, it's the blades. The engine companies make maybe twenty percent of their volume is on the blades, but forty percent of the profit is on the blades, okay. The blades are the most — the vanes are the most valuable part.

But the firing temperature went up even higher. Does anybody know why the firing temperature went up faster than the material capability temperature? The firing temperature now is above the melting temperature of the alloy. And I should have brought this in, I'll bring it in maybe tomorrow. They basically put holes in the engines and they blow thousand-degree-Fahrenheit air through there, the compressor air. So it creates a boundary layer that insulates the edge of the material from the very hot firing gases. You know that thermodynamically the higher the temperature of your firing gas, the more efficient the engine can be. And they were always limited before, basically, by the properties of the material. But then they got better, and they increased the firing temperature by essentially using a boundary layer cooling against the surface. If you ever lost your cooling gas, your engine would melt, okay. But you can't really lose your compressor, because your compressor is part of the engine. If the engine's spinning, it's going to be compressing air. So you always get your hot compressed air at a thousand degrees.

I served on a committee of the National Research Council back in — probably twelve years ago — and we were supposed to be telling the Air Force how to spend the three hundred million dollars they have on each year for improved jet engines. And basically there were two of us that were materials people, and we had people on there from Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, these were the people who had headed up the design of the last major engine for these companies. And I remember the first day, forty of us in this room, and they said let's go around, everybody introduce yourself and tell us what you think this committee ought to be doing. And I was going to explain, well we've really reached the limit of our materials, and we really can't get higher temperature materials because everything else oxidizes above 2200 degrees Fahrenheit. And the guy sitting next to me happened to be the guy from Pratt Whitney who had designed one or two of their major engines. And he spoke first, and he said, well we've really gone as far as we can in our design, and we really need better materials, okay. I was going to say the exact opposite, which I did say and explained. He said, well — he had convinced the board of directors of Pratt & Whitney to spend 18 million dollars of their own — he trying to come up with an IOU — Mallory niobium melts at very high temperatures, but it oxidizes very easily, okay. And so he wanted to come up with an oxidation resistant niobium. I did my doctoral thesis on niobium aluminum, and so I knew that was a fool's errand, okay. But he convinced — I mean, he was the engine designer and he knew he needed higher temperature engine materials. So he convinced them to spend 18 million dollars of their own profits, okay. This wasn't government money, this was their own profits on developing a better engine material. I knew it was a fool's errand. And he admitted, he said, we spent 18 million dollars and we got nothing. I could have predicted that, okay. So he maybe should have talked to a materials engineer at Pratt & Whitney before he had gone off and done that.

This is my plots of steel industry stuff, but anyway, I do want to talk about the limits to material properties. And I had talked before about material properties are basically controlled by the strength of the atomic bonds. So here's a picture from 3.091-type stuff, where you have two atoms coming together, some distance radius, and radius divided — radius in angstroms, angstrom units. So you've got one atom stationary over here, and you bring the other atom closer, and the energy potential well looks like this. This is sometimes called the Lennard-Jones potential from the 1920s, from the British physicist, who chemist or whatever he was, physical chemist, chemical physicist who did — you know there's a difference between a physical chemist and a chemical physicist, but we won't go into that right now. Anyway, so here's the shape of the bonding curve between two atoms. And it turns out the depth of the curve is the energy, the first derivative is the force versus displacement which is — modulus, or it — which is not the modulus, force versus displacement which is strength, and the second derivative is a modulus, okay, of that.

So if we're talking about material properties, there are limits. And we talked about the fact that certain bonds — turns out strongest bonds, let's call it carbon rather than silicon oxygen, diamond has a modulus of 60 million psi, there is nothing any greater. If I know what tungsten is, it's about 50 million; molybdenum, it's about 40 million; iron, steel is about 30 million. So you get half of the max with steel at a much lower cost than diamond, okay. Strength: you can get the maximum strength based on that Lennard-Jones potential, right there, is about three million psi, can't get any more. Now in fact we get about ten times less because of dislocations or brittleness or other things. Toughness, which is the measure of brittleness, the energy of fracture as opposed strength as the force of fracture, toughness is the energy of fracture. For structural materials, toughness, turns out the toughest material is about three hundred megapascals root meter, which also is the same as ksi root inch, okay, square root of inch. And the cost — pay whatever you want. Whatever someone will pay, you can charge. And who pays the most per pound for materials? Golfers, okay. You can sell a new material to a golfer at any price, okay. Golfers tend to be men who are greater than 50 years old who have been successful, and they'll pay anything to rub their nose — their colleagues in it, okay. So you can sell anything to a golfer.

But there are limits. I put this up before, of strength versus relative cost. This is an Ashby plot. And you just can't go any higher. The strength of ceramics, but it's in a dashed line, because they're brittle. And the ones that are not brittle, like some of your composites, engineered composites, very pricey. The low cost at high strength turns out to be glasses, like fiberglass, mild steel, cast iron, crushed stone, things like that. So why do we use a lot of crushed stone and things? Well, we've talked about that, okay. Any questions on that? So that's sort of a review of where we've been. I will do some fracture mechanics later, but I want to talk about competition between materials.

Actually, let me before I do that, let me put one thing up. I talked about the six materials that are in the billion ton per year club. Turns out it's iron at about a billion tons a year. It turns out it's stone at about six tons a year, which could be magnesium, calcium, potassium — no, potassium's not, magnesium, calcium, aluminum, silicon, and oxygen, okay, basically stone in various ways. And the carbon's not here because polymers, if it was carbon, I'd put hydrogen in here, if it's polymers, for hydrocarbons. It's here because cement is basically magnesium and calcium carbonate, and that's 2.2 billion tons per year. There's only six elements on the periodic table, or seven if I include the oxygen, seven elements that are in the billion tons per year category of structural materials. I mean, it might be sort of a very general way to look at it, but there's only a few materials that we really use a lot of, and the reason is cost, unless you're in the aerospace industry or something else.

But there's also — there is a healthy competition among materials, and that's what this stuff is. Beverage containers, or food containers. So we have steel. You might want some chili. But the problem with steel is corrosion. This is painted on the inside, either with a white coating, a paint, or a clear coating that you don't really see, okay. And it may be coated in some cases with a little bit of tin. Very little bit of tin will defeat some of the corrosion. We have composites — very light, that's empty, I won't throw this, when this actually still has potato chips in it — that's okay. But it's a composite: plastic top, cellulose walls, steel bottom. I mean, hey, it's a composite, right? I didn't have a drink box, but I did have aluminum. Problem with aluminum is cost, okay. Did you know that in Japan — I don't know if it's still true, but thirty years ago I went to Japan — in Japan thirty years ago the soda cans were all made out of steel, and that was because the steel companies controlled so much of the Japanese economy that they influenced the beverage manufacturers to use steel cans as opposed to aluminum cans, okay. Classic. Here is real junk food, okay, spaghetti and meatballs, Chef Boyardee, probably plastic inside the thing to plastic. Water bottles, right. The problem with plastic cups — and I didn't put — well, I did put glass in there, I didn't have a glass — oh, I did have a glass thing, this is just a glass container for freshening up the air, Air Wick. But here's ceramic, which is of course tea mug, okay. So we don't have to pass all these around, but they all compete.

Why do they all compete? Each one of them's a huge business, okay. Steel can only really make it in canned goods like chili, or Campbell Soup, because of cost. It's the cheapest, and you can paint them, and they will hold up as long as the food will hold up, or probably longer than the food will hold up. Aluminum, because of formability — you'd have a hard time in steel drawing a can that deep, okay, with a depth-to-width ratio like that. But aluminum is expensive. Nonetheless, about forty percent of the aluminum industry is packaging materials, which means aluminum foil and cans, and it's mostly cans. If it weren't for the can business, Alcoa, Novelis, and Pechiney and others would be out of business, okay. Glass: wonderful material to store food in, because it's clean, you can wash it, but it weighs a lot, and it's brittle. So if you go to a brewery where they're making ten million barrels a year, it turns out the glass factory will be bordering right on the brewery factory, because you can't afford with these brittle bottles to manufacture them even ten miles away. You manufacture them right there next to the brewery site, okay, so that you can come off the assembly line and transport them right over to the factory right next door, okay. There's a number of industries like that have to be side by side.

Plastic, the problem with plastic is permeable. In some cases, like our drink boxes, aside from the recycling and the cost — I didn't have a composite drink box, but it turns out the composites sometimes are seven layers, just to have a simple little fruit juice in one of those little rectangular boxes. Seven-layer composite. And it's got foil, it's got several different types of plastic, it's got paper, you know — it's just anyway, and there's adhesives, layers in between. It's just incredible. But even they can compete with these things. Plastic, the permeability of plastic — it's not really a big deal. Turns out the strength sometimes, you need strength in these things. You know how flex — this one's not quite so terribly flexible, but you've seen the Nestle Poland Spring water bottles or whatever, and boy, if you kind of wonder if they'll hold the strength to be able to drink the water, right. And those are — they made those about as thin as they possibly can. The aluminum cans are actually designed on a supercomputer, okay, for forming and thinness and stuff, and they take advantage of the pressurized contents. You know, the 2-liter Coke bottles or whatever, their design, they got plenty of strength as long as they got CO2 pressure in them, right. You can pick them up no problem. Some of those things, particularly the cheaper brands, you pop the thing and you'll release the pressure and you try to pick them up and you think it's going to slip out of your hand. You can't get a grip on it because it collapses on you, right. There's no strength to it. So the cost of the plastics is an issue as well as the permeability, okay. And then of course, we have plastic cups. I had a wooden cup, where's — Milo, oh here's even wooden cups. Styrofoam, paper, plastic bowls, styrofoam, paper, okay. They all compete with each other.

And 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 here, okay. And just because someone in one area where you have lots of different products that compete — just because someone does something and gets a slight advantage over someone else, the other people just don't want to just die and go away. They actually want to compete, and so they will invest more money. That's what happened in transformer steels. We used to, for motors, 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. And then someone discovered Metglas foil, an amorphous metal foil, and it had the lowest magnetic losses of any material in the world. And so they built a 40 million dollar plant down in South Carolina to make this stuff. But turns out 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. Well, they improved their silicon iron that they had not really improved on for about forty years, and so now the two of them are in competition again. Continual competition, continual improvement in properties, mostly driven by what does the market require.

If you've got the market, you don't care too much about inventing a new material. You're happy just going along and not innovating and waiting for someone else to do the innovation, okay. Most big companies are too busy not innovating. Are people familiar with Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma? Anybody know? Donny, you must know — at Legos, right? — you haven't heard of Innovator's Dilemma? Okay. So fifteen years ago Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School wrote a book called The Innovator's Dilemma, and he pointed out that big companies are so busy just maintaining the product they got and trying to improve their high-end business — let's take Boeing as an example, since you are Boeing people. They wanted to make an all composite aircraft. So the 777 originally was going to be all composite, until they started pricing it. They said oops, we'll never build this one in the next ten years, so they decided it was going to be thirty percent composite and seventy percent aluminum, rather than one hundred percent aluminum. But then when they got to the 787, they said we're really going to do it now, and they did build a 787, and it's about, what, eighty percent composite or something? I mean, it's a huge change. The V-22 Osprey in the 1990s, Bell Boeing, that was a hundred percent composite because it had to be. There wasn't a choice. But you're going to pay 60 million dollars for an aircraft that holds 16 people, as opposed to an aircraft, you know, paying 250 million for an aircraft that holds 250 people or something. So the economics are different for a military aircraft and a commercial aircraft, but it turns out you can do it. But there have been all kinds of headaches whenever you're the innovator. You get all kinds of headaches, and mostly people let other smaller companies eat at the bottom of their business, and that's the innovator's dilemma.

Do you invest your money on improving your existing product, or do you protect the bottom of your market, okay? And we can — I'll probably talk about that some when we get to the steel business and what happened to the big steel companies. They basically wanted to protect their more profitable parts of their business and they let the less profitable parts go, and it turns out eventually those people doing the less profitable part ate their lunch, okay. And that's the innovator's dilemma. So do you innovate, do you work on the bottom of your business, or do you work on the top of your business? And turns out you have to do both, okay. So let's see you tomorrow.