Chinese team develops purest, strongest tungsten material for fusion reactor, military applications
- Team at Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei says it has produced a large piece of pure tungsten with tensile strength greater than most alloys used today
- Applications include use in the US military’s ‘rods of God’ to China’s ‘artificial sun’ reactor
A pure, strong form of tungsten has been created, according to Chinese developers who say it can be used in kinetic energy weapons and nuclear fusion reactors.
The team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei, Anhui province, said they had developed the strongest bulk material made of tungsten, reporting that the production technology would allow it to be used in the most demanding of applications.
Tungsten, one of the heaviest, hardest natural elements with the highest melting point (3,410 degrees Celsius) of all metals, can improve the performance of equipment used in extreme environments.
But it is also brittle. A component entirely made of tungsten powder cracks or breaks apart easily if stretched or under stress.
In most real-life applications, material scientists must add softer elements such as nickel, copper or iron to increase the product’s ductility.
In a paper published last month in Acta Materialia, a top-ranking international peer-reviewed journal, a research team led by professor Wu Xuebang of the Institute of Solid State Physics in Hefei said they had produced a large piece of pure tungsten with tensile strength reaching 1.35 gigapascals at room temperature – stronger than that of most tungsten alloys used today.