If you're ever unlucky enough to have a car with metal tires, you might consider a set made from a new alloy engineered at Sandia National Laboratories. You could skid -- not drive, skid -- around Earth's equator 500 times before wearing out the tread.
Sandia's materials science team has engineered a platinum-gold alloy believed to be the most wear-resistant metal in the world. It's 100 times more durable than high-strength steel, making it the first alloy, or combination of metals, in the same class as diamond and sapphire, nature's most wear-resistant materials. Sandia's team recently reported their findings in Advanced Materials. "We showed there's a fundamental change you can make to some alloys that will impart this tremendous increase in performance over a broad range of real, practical metals," said materials scientist Nic Argibay, an author on the paper.
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