A New Superhard Compound Has Been Discovered - Substitute for Tungsten Carbide?

Recently, it is reported that a team of international scientists discovered a new type of superhard material that can be applied in drilling, mechanical engineering and other fields – a compound based on tungsten boride. Research has confirmed that the new tungsten boride developed is superior to the tungsten carbide cobalt composite and synthetic diamond materials currently in widely use.

Superhard materials have broad applications in many fields such as drilling, machinery manufacturing, metal processing, defense industry, and medicine. Although diamonds have the highest hardness, they are rare materials. Even for artificial diamonds, the cost is unacceptable for many applications. So, over the past 80 years, tungsten carbide drills, has maintained its market dominance at an unbeatable price.

Tungsten boride is a black or gray hexagonal crystalline powder that also has a high hardness and is often used as a wear resistant coating for wear parts and a semiconductor film. Previously, due to the difficulty in synthesis, there have been few applications of tungsten boride.

Tungsten carbide materials have been in service for decades in the manufacture of drill bits for drilling rigs, including drill bits, and perforating bullets (a perforating bullet is a drilling tool similar to an armor-piercing projectile). These rigid materials either require higher pressure synthesis or have much lower fracture toughness. In short, they require at least two hard indicators, namely hardness and toughness.

As we all know, hardness and toughness are two parameters that mutually oppose each other in the metal. If the hardness is too high, then the toughness becomes too low, and that the material would be brittle and fragile. Therefore, finding the equilibrium point of two parameters is the research object that scientists have been working on for many years. Scientists have used the USPEX evolutionary algorithm to predict a new material, WB5, which successfully balances the drill bit between the two most important parameters, hardness and fracture toughness. Compared to tungsten carbide cobalt drills, this new material is 50% higher at hardness and 20% lower at fracture toughness. The new material is an unknown compound based on tungsten boride and can be easily obtained under normal conditions. The new material is currently being tested in a large Russian project and is expected to be a new material for drilling applications.

Interestingly, the new material discovered by this team of scientists was confirmed by the analog synthesis of supercomputer systems. Previously they tried a lot of materials and entered them into computer systems to predict and calculate the performance of these materials. In the end, this new substance was discovered. In short, tungsten borides have been well studied previously; the newly discovered tungsten boride compound is totally a surprise. Is the newly discovered tungsten boride compound going to compete with the widely used tungsten carbide?

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