Beryllium

This section is a bit dead at the moment, so Ill try to fix that.

What would you think about a metal almost identical to 7075 aluminum, but only 2/3 of the weight?

Good, some heads are turning. But this isnt any special alloy, but 99% pure beryllium. After Ferrari started using it for the pistons in their engines, it got outlawed in both Formula 1 and BattleBots (not in Robot Wars though).

Why, I can hear you ask? Because it offered an unfair advantage for those with endless piles of money. While a kilo of regular 7075 aluminum will set you back about 20 euros, a kilo of 99% pure beryllium will cost in excess of 4000 euros!

Anyones intressted in buying some?

Ill have 10 kilos:)

Anyone want to guess what storm 3s gonna be made out of? :)

I dont think you will be able to get Beryllium in those quantities :).

I give Christian bad ideas for topics.

Speaking of Storm, I wonder when Ed finds this?

Brge, this was an excellent idea!

Im carving my next heavyweight chassis out of a single diamond.

What worth has the strongest armour when your robot learns to fly anyway ?

Id rather have a robot with involuntary flying-apart syndrome than contract CBD from having the strongest, lightest armour cut out from sheets of beryllium.

Beryllium has several GIANT disadvantages.
The main one to stop every normal person is that it is poisenous,easely into lethality. Thats the main reason it is outlawed in Battlebots, not the pricetag-the next disadvantage-

And main thing, if you try to buy enough Beryllium, or certain alloys of it, you can expect a visit from the Man In Black-its a main component for any effici«nt small nuke or hydrogen bomb.

Cancel my 10 kilos then:)

I knew that part, but I thought Id post it anyway. Exposure to the metal itself isnt to leathal, but when machining the material you always relase some quantities of dust and fumes.

Inhaling pure beryllium dust or fumes cause beryllosis, which can be fatal.

However, about 15% of the world population are naturally sensitive to beryllium. Those individuals will develop an inflammatory reaction in the respiratory system, which often results in death.

And you still wanted to bring this up ?
Well... thank you very much indeed for trying to reduce the opposition by means of autodarwination !

.....and the audience :)

Brings a whole new meaning to the term dead metal.....

-- Kev

Well...hes just plowing the way for us, hopefully , three teams from Sweden :proud:. We need all the advantages we can get...he he.

You found out my evil scheme! Imagine what would happen when we arrived:

Event organiser: So why are you Swedes wearing full biosuites?
Swedish roboteer: What do you mean? This is normal clothing in Sweden.

That wouldnt be very cool though. I mean literary, it would be very warm in there! Better make sure to have air condition in it. Which also would lead to an intressting dialogue:

Even organiser: You need any help?
Swedish roboteer: That reminds me, where could I find a place to plug in my charger? The batteries for my biosuit air condition is getting low.

Some bright spark engineer at work suggested Beryllium for some high pressure windows in our oil logging tools.

The only people we could find who were prepared to machine it were in Germany and it was done in a sealed environment - the machinist had to step into an environmental suit.

When it arrived at our factory everyone who was to handle it was given face masks and gloves and told that if any dust got into a cut it would never heal. The foreman then chiped in that a few years earlier in a previous job he visited a factory where a machinist had cut his finger, the cut didnt heal, and he had his hand amputated. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but we all bottled out and promptly told them what they could do with their new wonder material.

On the other hand, it is stronger than Titanium and half the weight. When held in the hand (with gloves - and face mask) it was amazingly light.

So Beryllium is a no no then :)

Sounds like a terrific material. Strong and light. They are probably just exaggerating the hazards. Just use a pair of gloves when you are grinding it. :)

Strong and light, but brittle and very susceptible to fatigue.

I know that if you want to produce anything out of Beryllium in the US, youll have the Environmental Protection Agency breathing down your neck.

It has comparably low impact hardness and is only somewhat stronger than 6061 Al. Im sure there are stronger alloys of Be, but its strength is not its strength ;). Rather, its structural efficientcy (stiffness/weight) is whats so attractive.

So its not going to help you except in the frame of your robot and other things where weight and stiffness are important. Definately not a good candidate for armor.

Solid parts are not dangerous, but machining them is and is a bit more difficult than other structural materials (its susceptible to tool-induced microcracking that can lead to fatigue problems).

And its not legal.

Stick with Aluminum and Titanium for structure...or even high strength steel. If you need light weight stiff components that dont need to be tough, use unidirectional laminated carbon fiber :). Its much cheaper and safer than beryllium.

Mack

Speaking of really expensive materials, I also like materials with extreme microporosity on a micron scale (the stuff Im talking about is http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/tech/aerogel.html>

Its not _that_ expensive, considering its low weight. Could be possible to use in ants?

Hmm. I too had wondered about aerogel, the idea being to fill the inside of the robot with it completely (other than the amount required for ventilation) to prop up the armour.

Thing is, a) its very brittle (one hit and youd have something resembling glass powder in your motors), b) its strong for its weight, but then its weight is almost nothing, and c) I hadnt realised it was quite this expensive.

Mind you, one kilo would probably be too much with which to fill a robot.

IIRC NASA used it to trap comet dust. I strongly suspect the stuff has less esoteric uses, but Im not sure they intersect with combat robotics.

Okay, what use do we think Eds going to find for (scuse spelling) Buckminster-Fullerine?

--
Fluppet

The brittleness might be a problem in ants, since it would be hard to shield; might work as sacrificial armour, perhaps.

Back to metals, Rhodium (not sure I trust my spelling at all today - is that right?) is very hard - white gold gets coated with the stuff. I believe its the hardest pure metal (so Im told), which probably makes it useful for plating things, but I dont know how it compares to strange alloys. Plus its a tad pricey.

--
Fluppet

Rhodium is a platinum metal, hence the high price. Its not that hard though, just very strong (even stronger than 6AL-4V titanium).

Really? Strange. I was going off what I was told by a jeweller, who Im prepared to believe had a limited knowledge in structural metallurgy. I can see the point in coating something with a hard substance, but less with coating something in a strong substance. Mind you, compared with silver/gold alloy, I suppose its still quite hard.

Having said that, most of its worn off - the ring isnt the colour it used to be, and looks more like it has some gold in it.

--
Fluppet

€œAn experiment by Eva Obersdrster at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas which introduced fullerenes into water at concentrations of 0.5 parts per million found that largemouth bass suffered a 17-fold increase in cellular damage in the brain tissue after 48 hours.€
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullereneshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerenes

Ed is probably either going to poison fish or suffer enough brain damage to go lie in a large electricity substation during a rainstorm in order to test out C60s superconductivity properties :)

Actually, thats a thought. A YBCuO variant superconducting electromagnet might cope with the traditionally suggested business of picking up your opponents (with the traditional problem of by what?) Of course, not breaking the electromagnetic interference rule in the process might be a challenge.

Okay, what havent we covered yet. Gold. We need gold heat exchangers. Then Garys motor wouldnt overheat. :-) (If its good enough for McLaren...)

--
Fluppet

Well, theres also depleted uranium and unniloctium, both very heavy metals for when you need some really dense ballast material.

Well, osmium is your friend, and a little less radioactive IIRC. (I have a vague recollection of the kids on Chocky playing with a ball of osmium which, frankly, theres no way they would have been able to lift - but at least theyd have been sterilised by the radioactivity, so given how annoying they were theres an upside.)

Not that Ive yet found many roboteers looking for ballast...

--
Fluppet

Iridium is actually heavier than Osmium (even if its only by 40 kilos per cubic metre).

lol whatever happened to the days of walking through a scrap yard, looking at something and saying, yeah thats metal, thatll do.

And when weve built Toxic the super-heavy, radioactive robot well use lead-based paint to finish it off.

We use lead already! Well, those of us who havent graduated to cadmium do, anyway.

gary - metal? I just settle for I could probably weld to some part of that.

lol

Now what shall we use to power our flipper? Hydrogen? Mustard Gas? Ammonia? Pure Oxygen? Cyanide Gas?

How about Francium? Its not like theyd ever be able to prove that you had any, even if it WAS against the rules. Just need a way to store and harness it now....

-- Kev

If you want to make a flipper really dangerous, you could use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihydrogen>antihydrogren

How about developing a quantum singularity weapon. Takes up next to no space but there could be a problem keeping within the weight limit.