Nanomaterial Breaks New Hardness Record

Natalia Dubrovinskaia of Heidelberg University and colleagues in Bayreuth, Paris and Grenoble have synthesized a superhard nanocomposite made from boron nitride that has a maximum Vickers hardness of around 85 GPa, approaching the hardness of a diamond of 100 Gpa.

Since 1950s, crystalline cubic boron nitride has been used in a variety of important technical applications similar to those of diamond due to its termal stability up to 1650 K, compared with 950 K for diamond. However, boron nitride has not been able to replace diamond completely because its hardness is half that of diamond (50 GPa compared with 100 GPa).

Now, Dubrovinskaia and colleagues have made the first thermodynamically stable boron nitride with a hardness that approaches that of diamond's. The researchers achieved their result by reducing the size of the grains in the material from micron-sized down to the nanoscale.

Full article can be found at:
http://nanotechweb.org/articles/news/6/3/16/1