NEW NANOSTRUCTURES FOR THE NAVY'S NEEDS The U.S. Navy is about
to start coating its ships with a nanostructured version of an alumina-titania
ceramic that has been in use -- in conventional form -- for years. "The
mechanical properties of materials begin to change drastically as we
reduce grain size into the nanoscale regime," says Lawrence Kabacoff, a program
officer in the Office of Naval Research's materials division. "The
nanostructured version of this ceramic composite exhibits a toughness and
strain tolerance unprecedented in traditional ceramic materials. The
bond strength is double and the wear resistance is quadruple that of
conventional alumina-titania. The resistance to impact damage is so good that
we have to come up with new tests to measure it." The new coatings, whose grain
are less than 100 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, in diameter, were
developed by a university-industry-Navy consortium in work that began in 1997.
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