Then we also need to talk about Sodum, Potassum, Magnesum, Plutonum, Uranum, Cadmum, Chromum, Titanum and a bunch more. Why should Aluminum be the outlier?
Because platinum is also a concept. Nobody has gotten an aluminum record, or an aluminum medal. Some metals have ascended beyond mere utility into superficiality. Aluminium isn't there yet.
Team aluminum all the way. A higher up where I work is obsessed with stainless steel, he gets these monstrous heavy duty tables made out of SS that hold objects 1/3 of their weight. Makes lab rearranging a nightmare lol.
Aluminum is where it's at, and where it is, is everywhere.
Your cans? Aluminum. Your car? Mostly aluminum. Old wiring, you better believe that's aluminum. Your fucking phone screen is aluminum, sand paper is aluminum, half the birth stones are all aluminum let's fucking goooo baybee
Most cars are still steel. Source I work on cars in New England. So much rust, even on the ones with aluminum bodies, at least wherever it can touch a dissimilar metal and becomes a battery.
And crucially the important parts that keep it from exploding (cylinder liners) and save you in a crash (crumple and bumper cores) are almost all steel. Because it deforms better with simpler engineering.
See also iron brakes in most cars hardened steel bearings everywhere.
Yeah I’m mostly just shitting on it for fun too. But the pistons don’t work very long without steel rings, wrist pins and big end bolts.
The problem is we have to bring copper, brass and other fancy metals in them though, because the all spin on oil cushion bearings. Unless we’re talking Babbitt bushings from the early 1900s.
Weirdo types that decided they were in charge of naming things decided to name it Aluminium so it "matched" the likes of other metals like titanium, iridium, etc
Guy that named it called it Aluminum, Alumium, and Aluminium. Aluminium stuck, even in the US.
Then some weirdo types decided they were in charge of naming things in the US decided it needs to be Aluminum. It took them about 50-90 years to succeed.
No, the guy who discovered it called it Alumium, after Alum. Both Aluminum and Aluminium were later constructions by journals on opposite sides of the pond.
That's not how acronym pronunciation works though. We don't pronounce them based on the words they stand for, otherwise we would pronounce NASA, SCUBA, LASER, etc. differently. Both pronunciations have valid arguments so why can't we just accept both and stop being weird about it.
That's because the only way to get aluminum, historically, was to find nuggets of it. The process for extracting it from bauxite wasn't invented until the mid to late 1800s. This is reflected in Dwarf Fortress, as aluminum metal has the same value as platinum and bauxite is a near-worthless construction material.
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but literally all the iron in the human body is either part of a protein or bound to other molecules. It's not an alloy per se, but it isn't exactly pure iron
Sounds like aluminum is a loner and iron plays well with others. I'd bet there is still more iron encountered every day than aluminum even if the aluminum is pure and the iron is alloyed.
Really now? I thought most steel had way more carbon & chromium/nickel/manganese than that. I guess I underestimate how little is needed to make iron no longer mushy.
It is mainly only in stainless steels that have anything other than iron in high concentrations, they might have something like 30% of their weight elements other than iron
Perhaps so, but one might argue that human tech relies more on iron than any other metal - because of its magnetic properties. We need iron to generate and manipulate electricity.
I saw something the other day where a dude talking about a car they were fixing up said they used aluminum for the finish because it looked better than steel and I'm just like "that sounds like how I've heard girls prefer eggshell to off-white. They're the same color!"
I'm not the person you're replying to, but actually, I didn't know that; I just went and read up the history of the word and it's pretty interesting (for a nerd like me), so thank you for highlighting this. I admit, it used to confuse/irk me to hear Americans pronouncing aluminium like aluminum, so it pleases me to realise that I was wrong and that Americans are actually just pronouncing aluminum like aluminum.
I think I didn't realise this in part because apparently aluminium is generally used in American scientific writing. This is interesting to me because many journals style guidelines demand American spellings of words (My mind blanks of specific examples right now, but I often have to replace s with z when Americanising my writing). I don't know why, but I find it neat to imagine a kinship with a hypothetical American scholar who curses as they "correct" aluminum to aluminium before submitting their paper.
Edit: I can't believe I literally wrote an example of a word with the relevant s/z thing and didn't notice. Americanise/Americanize
The same people who presumably fill balloons with helum, want to cut down on sodum in their diet, prevent Iran from refining uranum, power their phones with lithum batteries, and enjoy singing David Guetta's house classic Titanum
While I agree, I do have to clarify that there is a fatigue limit, it's mainly that the limit for steel increases so fast that few people are willing to put in the testing for billions of cycles to model ultra-high cycle fatigue
Where is that limit supposed to be? The line does not flatten, unlike that of steel. Which is a flat line from 1 million to 1 billion cycles. During the same number of cycles, aluminium drops from 25 to 14 ski, a loss of 44 %. The article specifically mentions:
Some metals such as ferrous alloys and titanium alloys have a distinct limit, whereas others such as aluminium and copper do not and will eventually fail even from small stress amplitudes.
Head's up, referring to it as a "limit" like your article did is incorrect. In engineering you have what's called an S-N diagram, which plots out the average time to failure based on average cyclic stress. Basically, a lower avaerage stress results in a higher average life. Also, this plot uses a logarithmic scale for both axis, because then all of the plots are straight lines.
For steel, the S-N diagram has what's called the "knee", which is where you have two distinct lines in the S-N curve: one horizontal and one at an angle, with the two intersecting at 1 million cycles. Referring to the knee as a limit (like in the article) is wrong because it's not a limit; it's the threshold where if you design a part to last beyond that (aka less cyclic stress than would get 1 million cycles) then it practically lasts forever.
In reality, the part won't actually last forever, since the S-N curve beyond 1 million cycles isn't perfectly horizontal. It's just that reducing your cyclic stress quickly increases your predicted life into billions or even trillions of cycles. This is known as ultra-high cycle fatigue, and it's generally impractical to do all the testing required to model because each sample would take months to test on the low end. Plus, there's little demand for such models in the industry, though there are a handful of PhD students and post-docs working on it
Does that change anything regarding the discussion? If the limit is quickly so high that it is beyond reasonable time spans? In the comparison at hand, aluminium has no fatigue limit, steel does. They still use aluminium for aircraft etc. due to the superior weight savings.
It was the early 90’s and Raleigh had a line called Technium. The tubes were bonded to the lugs. Not really welded. More pinned and “glued” I guess. The frame broke at either the top or down tube and there went the fork, and my buddy’s face. Screw aluminum. Steel has memory. I found that out the hard way. I’m far from a metallurgist. This is the extent of my elementary teacher brain.
And a broken cf seat post is scary.
All the people here who bought this wireless tungsten cube to admire its surreal heft have precisely the wrong mindset. I, in my exalted wisdom and unbridled ambition, bought this cube to become fully accustomed to the intensity of its density, to make its weight bearable and in fact normal to me, so that all the world around me may fade into a fluffy arena of gravitational inconsequence. And it has worked, to profound success. I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. Big burly manly men who pump iron now seem to me as little children who raise mere aluminum.
I can hardly remember the days before I became a man of tungsten. How distant those days seem now, how burdened by the apparent heaviness of everyday objects. I laugh at the philistines who still operate in a world devoid of tungsten, their shoulders thin and unempowered by the experience of bearing tungsten. Ha, what fools, blissful in their ignorance, anesthetized by their lack of meaningful struggle, devoid of passion.
Nietzsche once said that a man who has a why can bear almost any how. But a man who has a tungsten cube can bear any object less dense, and all this talk of why and how becomes unnecessary.
Schopenhauer once said that every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Tungsten expands the limits of a man’s field of vision by showing him an example of increased density, in comparison to which the everyday objects to which he was formerly accustomed gain a light and airy quality. Who can lament the tragedy of life, when surrounded by such lightweight objects? Who can cry in a world of styrofoam and cushions?
Have you yet understood? This is no ordinary metal. In this metal is the alchemical potential to transform your world, by transforming your expectations. Those who have not yet held the cube in their hands and mouths will not understand, for they still live in a world of normal density, like Plato’s cave dwellers. Those who have opened their mind to the density of tungsten will shift their expectations of weight and density accordingly.
To give this cube a rating of anything less than five stars would be to condemn life itself. Who am I, as a mere mortal, to judge the most compact of all affordable materials? No. I say gratefully to whichever grand being may have created this universe: good job on the tungsten. It sure is dense.
I sit here with my tungsten cube, transcendent above death itself. For insofar as this tungsten cube will last forever, I am in the presence of immortality.
Doesn't most cheapo aluminum have iron mixed in to make it more affordable? I worked at a machine shop a couple of months and I remember the shitty castings downright having iron bubbles inside them
Makes a great lightweight dutch oven as well (especially when hard anodised). Non stick, doesn't rust, still distributes and holds heat really well, and about 1/3 of the weight.
A-lu-min-i-um
People always argue that -num isn't a legitimate way for the name of an element to end, but I never see you guys talking about Platinium.
All words are made up and language isn't real
Then we also need to talk about Sodum, Potassum, Magnesum, Plutonum, Uranum, Cadmum, Chromum, Titanum and a bunch more. Why should Aluminum be the outlier?
Yeah well blowsraspberry
You know thwy spelled them all wrong on purpose, right?
Because platinum is also a concept. Nobody has gotten an aluminum record, or an aluminum medal. Some metals have ascended beyond mere utility into superficiality. Aluminium isn't there yet.
Pronounced aluminyum
Halloumi, yummy.
Team aluminum all the way. A higher up where I work is obsessed with stainless steel, he gets these monstrous heavy duty tables made out of SS that hold objects 1/3 of their weight. Makes lab rearranging a nightmare lol.
STEEL IS AN ALLOY, YOU PHILISTINE
The actual aluminium that people work with in actual real life are also alloys.
Your heresy is forgiven because you used the superior spelling of the metal in question.
Britbong detected, opinion discarded
Aluminum is where it's at, and where it is, is everywhere.
Your cans? Aluminum. Your car? Mostly aluminum. Old wiring, you better believe that's aluminum. Your fucking phone screen is aluminum, sand paper is aluminum, half the birth stones are all aluminum let's fucking goooo baybee
Most cars are still steel. Source I work on cars in New England. So much rust, even on the ones with aluminum bodies, at least wherever it can touch a dissimilar metal and becomes a battery.
And crucially the important parts that keep it from exploding (cylinder liners) and save you in a crash (crumple and bumper cores) are almost all steel. Because it deforms better with simpler engineering.
See also iron brakes in most cars hardened steel bearings everywhere.
I was referring to the engine block and pistons being aluminum. I assume chassis and many of the critical spinning bits are still steel or iron.
It's also mostly a shit post. I'm a machinist and I am surrounded by aluminum in funny forms.
Yeah I’m mostly just shitting on it for fun too. But the pistons don’t work very long without steel rings, wrist pins and big end bolts.
The problem is we have to bring copper, brass and other fancy metals in them though, because the all spin on oil cushion bearings. Unless we’re talking Babbitt bushings from the early 1900s.
It's alumina. Which is aluminium oxide.
Two punches for calling it Aluminium
Us Americans are too excited about making stuff with our Uh-loo-min-um that we just skip pronouncing some of the vowels
Guy that named it called it Aluminum
Weirdo types that decided they were in charge of naming things decided to name it Aluminium so it "matched" the likes of other metals like titanium, iridium, etc
And thanks for that. Aluminum is a stupid ass name.
As opposed to "Platinium"
Tantalium
Guy that named it called it Aluminum, Alumium, and Aluminium. Aluminium stuck, even in the US.
Then some weirdo types decided they were in charge of naming things in the US decided it needs to be Aluminum. It took them about 50-90 years to succeed.
You can say "British" here
No, the guy who discovered it called it Alumium, after Alum. Both Aluminum and Aluminium were later constructions by journals on opposite sides of the pond.
Let me guess: you pronounce GIF as Jif just because the creator is a peanut butter obsessed weirdo who couldn't pronounce "graphics"?
That's not how acronym pronunciation works though. We don't pronounce them based on the words they stand for, otherwise we would pronounce NASA, SCUBA, LASER, etc. differently. Both pronunciations have valid arguments so why can't we just accept both and stop being weird about it.
Because I arbitrarily decided it's gif 13 years ago and anyone who says it the other way is wrong 😡😡😡
'MINUM!
IKR I'm so glad I can pronounce Aluminum the right way.
Always been more of an iridium man myself
Are you dense?
Not as bad as those osmium-heads, plus we've got sparkle and color!
I'll take osmium-heads over degenerates any day.
I prefer all my farm tools and weapons to be made out of iridium personally, but that’s just me
Mistborn moment
Aluminum is F grade allomantic material.
unless you need to block the allomancy
... Or other investiture
Cheese is better at blocking Shardblades anyway
Love a good ferromagnetic metal but how about that electric conductivity of copper
I'm a tungsten alloy man myself. Although it's not nearly as flexible as some other metals, god damn is it strong.
dwarf fortress taught me that aluminum is basically mithril
That's because the only way to get aluminum, historically, was to find nuggets of it. The process for extracting it from bauxite wasn't invented until the mid to late 1800s. This is reflected in Dwarf Fortress, as aluminum metal has the same value as platinum and bauxite is a near-worthless construction material.
I've never played that game but that's so cool
I can't think of many things you encounter every day that just use straight iron. Only alloys that use iron
Meanwhile, you'll use very pure aluminum all the time
You as a human use pure iron. But non-animate objects, yeah mostly alloys
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but literally all the iron in the human body is either part of a protein or bound to other molecules. It's not an alloy per se, but it isn't exactly pure iron
Sounds like aluminum is a loner and iron plays well with others. I'd bet there is still more iron encountered every day than aluminum even if the aluminum is pure and the iron is alloyed.
Pure virgin aluminium vs chad alloyed iron
I was super confused when I read "loaner", I thought you meant loaning as in like borrowing. But then I realized you meant "loner". Lol
Oops, my bad lol
Pure aluminium is only used when you need to have very little reactivity.
General construction steel has >98% weight iron. Around the same as most aluminium alloys.
Really now? I thought most steel had way more carbon & chromium/nickel/manganese than that. I guess I underestimate how little is needed to make iron no longer mushy.
It is mainly only in stainless steels that have anything other than iron in high concentrations, they might have something like 30% of their weight elements other than iron
sounds like a good argument for iron.
Perhaps so, but one might argue that human tech relies more on iron than any other metal - because of its magnetic properties. We need iron to generate and manipulate electricity.
I saw something the other day where a dude talking about a car they were fixing up said they used aluminum for the finish because it looked better than steel and I'm just like "that sounds like how I've heard girls prefer eggshell to off-white. They're the same color!"
Car guys are just the male equivalent of horse girls
I would have said centaurs were closer
He's right, though. I can't think of a metal more versatile than aluminium
Titanium perhaps - but that is more different to get.
Pity it's been suggested it's a cumulative neurotoxin that contributes to Alzheimer's disease. That's the one thing I don't like about aluminium.
Non drinkable metals are just lame. You cannot even make a good cocktail without Mercury or Gallium.
Every metal is drinkable as a hot soup
Team Stainless Steel all the way. Strong and tougher than that weak aluminum shit.
You... aluminum-loving sonofabitch.
Ever heard of hardened steel you aluminum loving mf?
Fatigue resistance
Heat resistance
I prefer some alu in my steel pan. Heats faster.
At least we can all agree that diamond is the hardest metal.
Dragonforce is the hardest metal known to man, it is the metal you use to break diamond
Pretty sure neutron star matter is the hardest metal buddy
Found the astronomer.
I’ve often heard that Diamond Is Unbreakable
but the love it's supposed to represent is not
I thought carbon fibre was the hardest metal
With the right definition, carbon fibre might indeed be a metal. But it's never the hardest.
that would be unoptanium, the hardest to find
easiest to find is definitely chinesium
Soft ass non-magnetic piece of shit aluminum
I still can't believe there's people pronouncing it aluminium instead of aluminium
You do realise that aluminium (ium) is not spelled the same as aluminum (um) ? It's not a case of the same letters being pronounced two different ways
I'm not the person you're replying to, but actually, I didn't know that; I just went and read up the history of the word and it's pretty interesting (for a nerd like me), so thank you for highlighting this. I admit, it used to confuse/irk me to hear Americans pronouncing aluminium like aluminum, so it pleases me to realise that I was wrong and that Americans are actually just pronouncing aluminum like aluminum.
I think I didn't realise this in part because apparently aluminium is generally used in American scientific writing. This is interesting to me because many journals style guidelines demand American spellings of words (My mind blanks of specific examples right now, but I often have to replace s with z when Americanising my writing). I don't know why, but I find it neat to imagine a kinship with a hypothetical American scholar who curses as they "correct" aluminum to aluminium before submitting their paper.
Edit: I can't believe I literally wrote an example of a word with the relevant s/z thing and didn't notice. Americanise/Americanize
The same people who presumably fill balloons with helum, want to cut down on sodum in their diet, prevent Iran from refining uranum, power their phones with lithum batteries, and enjoy singing David Guetta's house classic Titanum
Can confirm Rust is superior!
Don’t get me started on titanium! 🙄
Together they are thermite!
As a former cyclist, steel is real. I’ve seen aluminum bikes fail (as in, break at the top and down tube)during a ride. Screw your aluminum!
having no fatigue limit is a bitch.
While I agree, I do have to clarify that there is a fatigue limit, it's mainly that the limit for steel increases so fast that few people are willing to put in the testing for billions of cycles to model ultra-high cycle fatigue
Where is that limit supposed to be? The line does not flatten, unlike that of steel. Which is a flat line from 1 million to 1 billion cycles. During the same number of cycles, aluminium drops from 25 to 14 ski, a loss of 44 %. The article specifically mentions:
Head's up, referring to it as a "limit" like your article did is incorrect. In engineering you have what's called an S-N diagram, which plots out the average time to failure based on average cyclic stress. Basically, a lower avaerage stress results in a higher average life. Also, this plot uses a logarithmic scale for both axis, because then all of the plots are straight lines.
For steel, the S-N diagram has what's called the "knee", which is where you have two distinct lines in the S-N curve: one horizontal and one at an angle, with the two intersecting at 1 million cycles. Referring to the knee as a limit (like in the article) is wrong because it's not a limit; it's the threshold where if you design a part to last beyond that (aka less cyclic stress than would get 1 million cycles) then it practically lasts forever.
In reality, the part won't actually last forever, since the S-N curve beyond 1 million cycles isn't perfectly horizontal. It's just that reducing your cyclic stress quickly increases your predicted life into billions or even trillions of cycles. This is known as ultra-high cycle fatigue, and it's generally impractical to do all the testing required to model because each sample would take months to test on the low end. Plus, there's little demand for such models in the industry, though there are a handful of PhD students and post-docs working on it
Does that change anything regarding the discussion? If the limit is quickly so high that it is beyond reasonable time spans? In the comparison at hand, aluminium has no fatigue limit, steel does. They still use aluminium for aircraft etc. due to the superior weight savings.
Yes, because the term "fatigue limit" makes lay people think the exact opposite of what is intended.
not to defend Alluminium (bleh), but that's likely a production error, bad hydroforming, bad welds... at least it's not CF!
It was the early 90’s and Raleigh had a line called Technium. The tubes were bonded to the lugs. Not really welded. More pinned and “glued” I guess. The frame broke at either the top or down tube and there went the fork, and my buddy’s face. Screw aluminum. Steel has memory. I found that out the hard way. I’m far from a metallurgist. This is the extent of my elementary teacher brain. And a broken cf seat post is scary.
Aluminium doesn't get stronger on the welds like steel does, it gets weaker. So if you screw them up, you end up with a two part bike
Weaker or more brittle?
Weaker, by like 50%. Welding aluminium isn't worth it most of the time, just use steel if you need that. Otherwise bolt it together.
I love my steel bike, it's great on the road, on gravel or for a quick grocery shop.
I'm not gonna win any competition with it but it is honestly such a fun bike.
And with care it should last forever.
And now I'm back to looking at steel (and titanium) adventure hardtails...
All the Simpsons fans out there know how great Zinc is.
Okay starkiller.
Thorium master race.
Punching strangers in the face can get expensve.
But it is tungsten that reigns supreme:
All the people here who bought this wireless tungsten cube to admire its surreal heft have precisely the wrong mindset. I, in my exalted wisdom and unbridled ambition, bought this cube to become fully accustomed to the intensity of its density, to make its weight bearable and in fact normal to me, so that all the world around me may fade into a fluffy arena of gravitational inconsequence. And it has worked, to profound success. I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. Big burly manly men who pump iron now seem to me as little children who raise mere aluminum.
I can hardly remember the days before I became a man of tungsten. How distant those days seem now, how burdened by the apparent heaviness of everyday objects. I laugh at the philistines who still operate in a world devoid of tungsten, their shoulders thin and unempowered by the experience of bearing tungsten. Ha, what fools, blissful in their ignorance, anesthetized by their lack of meaningful struggle, devoid of passion.
Nietzsche once said that a man who has a why can bear almost any how. But a man who has a tungsten cube can bear any object less dense, and all this talk of why and how becomes unnecessary.
Schopenhauer once said that every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Tungsten expands the limits of a man’s field of vision by showing him an example of increased density, in comparison to which the everyday objects to which he was formerly accustomed gain a light and airy quality. Who can lament the tragedy of life, when surrounded by such lightweight objects? Who can cry in a world of styrofoam and cushions?
Have you yet understood? This is no ordinary metal. In this metal is the alchemical potential to transform your world, by transforming your expectations. Those who have not yet held the cube in their hands and mouths will not understand, for they still live in a world of normal density, like Plato’s cave dwellers. Those who have opened their mind to the density of tungsten will shift their expectations of weight and density accordingly.
To give this cube a rating of anything less than five stars would be to condemn life itself. Who am I, as a mere mortal, to judge the most compact of all affordable materials? No. I say gratefully to whichever grand being may have created this universe: good job on the tungsten. It sure is dense.
I sit here with my tungsten cube, transcendent above death itself. For insofar as this tungsten cube will last forever, I am in the presence of immortality.
Is this a copy pasta? If not, it should be
It is
Uranium is the one true metal
And i hate Tin..
/sn
Doesn't most cheapo aluminum have iron mixed in to make it more affordable? I worked at a machine shop a couple of months and I remember the shitty castings downright having iron bubbles inside them
Plastic for the win? 😁
Makes a great lightweight dutch oven as well (especially when hard anodised). Non stick, doesn't rust, still distributes and holds heat really well, and about 1/3 of the weight.
Yeah we have that meaning too :D
If aluminum's so great, why isn't there any lithotrophs that use it?