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 Amorphous metal - Definition 

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An amorphous metal is a metallic material (usually an alloy rather than a pure metal) that is non-crystalline; that is, there is no long-range order of the positions of the metal's atoms. Amorphous metals are commonly referred to as metallic glasses.

Amorphous metals are stronger than traditional crystalline metallic alloys and offer several other unique advantages over other conventional materials. Amorphous metals could be injection molded to create metallic parts which would be tedius to create otherwise. Additionally, amorphous metals can be formed into foams which are 99% air but 100-times stronger than polystyrene foam.


Amorphous metal can be made in several ways including:

  • Rapid liquid cooling
  • Undercooling of clean liquids
  • Physical vapor deposition
  • Chemical methods
  • Irradiation
  • Mechanical methods
  • Reactions.

In 1934 using vapor deposition, German armaments manufacturer Kramer produced the first amorphous metals.

The technique of rapid cooling was introduced by Pol Duwez at Caltech in 1957, and it became then the predominant industrial production technique for metallic glass materials. Rapid cooling, as the name implies, rapidly cools a jet of injected molten metal at a rate of at least 1 million kelvins per second . To cool the material at this rate, large cooling plates slap quickly onto the injected metal or a cooled, rotating drum creates ribbons of metallic glass. This method has the limitation of not being able to form thick pieces of amorphous metal.

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