Researchers Create Palladium Glass

Stronger-than-steel material a possibility for dental implants?

Are glass dental implants the way of the future? Lead study author Marios D. Demetriou, PhD, MS, and his collaborators have many laboratory professionals pondering that question, after publishing "A Damage-Tolerant Glass" online earlier this year in Nature Materials. The scientific article details how the team of researchers from Caltech and the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory created a form of glass that is supposedly stronger and tougher than steel, or any other known material.

The material is a combination of marginal glass (glass in its simplest form), the metal palladium, and small fractions of phosphorus, silicon, germanium, and silver, which make it resistant to extreme pressure and strain. "Unlike conventional brittle glasses, metallic glasses are generally capable of limited plastic yielding by shear-band sliding in the presence of a flaw, and thus exhibit toughness—strength relationships that lie between those of brittle ceramics and marginally tough metals," the researchers reported.