New methods are changing old materials
A company that makes steel for bearings used in heavy trucks had a big problem. The trucks travel through harsh, perilous environments such as Siberia, and an unexpected bearing failure on a remote stretch could literally put the driver's life in danger. Knowing how long the steel would hold up under those conditions was beyond their ability to predict experimentally, so they turned to specialists at MIT. Under applied weight, steel deforms over time at an ever-increasing rate. The exponent in the equations governing that process should be three, according to scientific theory, while experiments conducted over many decades always found it was really four or five, says MIT materials scientist Krystyn Van Vliet. Nobody could demonstrate the reason for this discrepancy — until now, using new computational techniques. Computers were able to solve the mystery by controlling all the variables and exploring every possible variation, Van...