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Computational materials science

Substitution with vision

Nature volume 491, pages 674–675 (2012)Cite this article

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A method has been developed for predicting the stability and elasticity of certain alloys for millions of atomic configurations of the materials. This approach should help to identify materials with optimized properties. See Letter p.740

Early civilizations began alloying copper with arsenic, tin or zinc nearly 6,000 years ago1, ushering in the Bronze Age. Even when more-abundant iron became a mainstay during the Iron Age, substitutional alloys of copper — in which some of the copper atoms were replaced with atoms of a different metal — were superior materials. So Roman foot soldiers were equipped with wrought-iron weapons, whereas Roman officers had swords made of bronze. Similarly, at the turn of the twentieth century, French scientists developed a steel that substituted some iron with vanadium. This alloy, which had three times the tensile strength of competing steels, became an essential ingredient of the venerable Ford Model T (and of early French luxury cars).

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Figure 1: Atomic configurations.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion2 were published online on 21 November 2012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gus L. W. Hart is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602, USA.,

    Gus L. W. Hart

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  1. Gus L. W. Hart
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Correspondence to Gus L. W. Hart.

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Hart, G. Substitution with vision. Nature 491, 674–675 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11755

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