US scientists claim to have engineered a platinum-gold alloy that may be the most wear-resistant metal in the world.
It is 100 times more durable than high-strength steel, making it the first alloy in the same class as diamond and sapphire, nature's most wear-resistant materials.
According to the researchers from the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, a set of tires made from the alloy would have to skid around Earth's equator 500 times before wearing out the tread.
"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 study published in the journal Advanced Materials.
Although metals are typically thought of as strong, when they repeatedly rub against other metals, like in an engine, they wear down, deform and corrode unless they have a protective barrier, like additives in motor oil.
In electronics, moving metal-to-metal contacts receive similar protections with outer layers of gold or other precious metal alloys.
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However, these coatings are expensive. Eventually they wear out, too, as connections press and slide across each other day after day, year after year, sometimes millions, even billions of times.
These effects are exacerbated the smaller the connections are, because the less material you start with, the less wear and tear a connection can endure before it no longer works.
With platinum-gold coating, only a single layer of atoms would be lost after a mile of skidding on the hypothetical tires.
The ultradurable coating could make electronics of all sizes and across many industries more cost-effective, long-lasting and dependable -- from aerospace systems and wind turbines to microelectronics for cell phones and radar systems, Argibay said.