Re:Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012)
by ars on Sunday July 19, 2015 @03:20AM
(#9910323)
All those things are true, but they just make it harder to duplicate. Not impossible or even especially difficult for people who know this stuff.
Plus there are only a limited number of ways you can mix them, a few trials and checking which come closest, then refining from there would get you there as well.
In alloys, there is what is called the Phase Diagram.
Depending on how you mix stuff (proportions), the temperature you mix them at, the pressure you mix them at, and the rate at which these change during the operation, you will have completely different characteristics.
There's also what is called the Time-Temperature-Transformation diagram.
It's not enough to set parameters, how they change matters, too.
The difference between hard steel bayonnette and a flexible shaving blade comes to mind to illustrate the influence of the rate of change of temperature, for example.
And here I only talked about a binary phase diagram. In the case of the article, it's a tin-silver-copper (as far as we know). The result is a solid. In a phase diagram, if you have it easy, it is finding a point in a continuum if you want to reverse engineer the alloy 100%.
[0]http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Textbook_Maps/Physical_Chemistry...
[1]http://www.sv.vt.edu/classes/MSE2094_NoteBook/96ClassProj/ex...