Cutting edge: These photos show the stages in which GFD, a German company, takes a carbide blade, adds a coating of nanocrystalline diamond, and sharpens it with ions.
Gesellschaft fuer Diamantprodukte mbH
A German company hopes a synthetic diamond material, engineered at the nanoscale, becomes a shaver's best friend.
For the last few months, Andre Flöter has been shaving with a diamond-tipped razor blade.
He's not some nouveau riche flaunting the newest kind of bling. He's the founder of GFD, a German company that for the last seven years has been selling blades that are coated with synthetic diamond and used for industrial purposes--such as medical scalpels and instruments that cut plastic sheeting. Now Flöter hopes to use the exceptional hardness of diamond to crack the multibillion-dollar market for consumer razor blades.
Seated in a café in Mannheim, Germany, a couple hours north of his office in Ulm (Albert Einstein's birthplace), Flöter whips out a plastic-handled razor that looks like ones you have at home. But inserted into this one is a prototype of GFD's diamond-tipped blades.
He demonstrates against his own arm hair how it cuts as smoothly as a regular razor. He hands it to me so I can try, and it feels like my regular razor. But one major difference, Flöter says, is that his diamond-tipped blade should last several years rather than a few weeks.
The body of the blade is made of tungsten carbide, a dense metal compound, and seems just like a typical commercial razor blade, except it is a little heavier and has a darker metallic color. The coating of synthetic diamond--carbon manipulated at the nanoscale--in the tip doesn't make it look shiny at all.
Flöter won't reveal details of how GFD creates a film of synthetic diamond. He's more forthcoming about how the company's blades, once made, are sharpened. The engineers take dozens of blades and stand them upright in a vacuum chamber. Then they hit the blades with ions of oxygen or chlorine gas that has been excited to a plasma state with an electric field. The process is akin to using extremely fine-grained sandpaper as a sharpener.
The resulting blade has a "radius of curvature"--the tiny edge of the blade, which is actually rounded at the microscopic level -- of about 50 nanometers. That's about 10 times sharper than the blades GFD sells for plastic sheet cutting. Flöter gives me his razor again: Not only does it cut when I press against my skin, as I would during a normal shave, but even just grazing the tips of my arm hair, the blade cuts with no effort at all.
To be sure, blades made this way would make razors much more expensive. But because they could last much longer than a cheap disposable razor, the blades could be cost-effective in the long run, perhaps paying for themselves in about a year, GFD hopes. First, though, Flöter needs a blade manufacturer to partner with his seven-employee company. If all goes well, his blades could hit the market within two or three years, he says.
It wouldn't be the first time diamond blades were marketed; Schick used to sell a razor it called the FX Diamond. But it didn't cost much more than standard blades; Flöter says Schick didn't produce a substantially harder or longer-lasting blade because it didn't use a pure diamond coating and didn't sharpen it the way GFD does. A Schick spokeswoman declined to comment on GFD's technology.
Durable molds could serve as a practical manufacturing tool in making nano devices.
A product touted as “nano” has hospitalized six German consumers, prompting more warnings over the dangers of nanomaterials.
A Danish engineer have found out that the reason why razor blades seem to get dull, is actually because of a layer of soap, skin, and hair that covers the blade.
He made this:
http://www.razorpit.com/index.php?language=en
That can remove this layer and help keep the blades sharp.
/Gorm
Interesting. I noticed that when I use a toothbrush to clean a 2 or 3-blade razor, the latter immediately gets sharper. The trick is to move the brush fibers in parallel to the blades. This gets rid of hair and soap between the blades.
One should also note that razor blades are very thin at the tip and can easily change shape when they collide with hair and skin. And it does not take much pressure to shape them back. This is why cleaning them with a toothbrush helps to sharpen them.
Ever since King Gillette built a thriving business around the safety razor, the classic business model has been to give away the razor and profit from consumables: the blades.
As much as I personally would like to have a blade that remained sharp for years, I doubt a manufacturer will see this as an advantage.
I fully agree with that...
I also personally think that the biggest issue with this technology is that it would "kill" the traditional business model of razor manufacturers (selling consumable blades), and so it seems unlikely to me that a razor manufacturer would invest in this kind of technology...
It's a bit like Dyson hoovers that were killing hoover manufacturer business models (selling hoover bags)... That the reason why James Dyson had to sell his innovative hoover by "himself"...
This guy is also selling the razors by himself. He knows razor companies aren't going to buy it.
Empa researchers discover why implant coatings detach: Nanocorrosion causes implants to fail
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Extra-hard coatings made from diamond-like carbon (DLC) extend the operating lifetime of tools and components. In artificial joints, however, these coatings often fail because they detach. Empa researchers found out why – and developed methods to both make the interface between the DLC layer and the metal underneath corrosion-resistant and to predict the lifetime of the implants.
Whether on computer hard disks, saw blades, embossing tools, razor blades or fuel-injection nozzles, extremely hard coatings made of diamond-like carbon (DLC) have proven their value over and over again. They reduce wear and thereby give tools and components a longer operating lifetime. What could be more logical than to apply DLC to medical implants such as artificial joints, reasoned a number of implant manufacturers. After all, wear is a problem there, too.
DLC has subsequently withstood endless in vitro tests in several manufacturers’ laboratories and has shown itself to be well tolerated by human tissue, extremely hard wearing, and resistant to the relatively aggressive environment in the human body. Despite this, when DLC-coated joints were first implanted into human patients, serious problems arose after only a few years. The DLC coatings were not worn away, but rather they detached from the implant material for no apparent reason.
Taking aims at the interface
In a project financed by the Swiss Innovation Promotion Agency (CTI) together with the medical technology company Synthes and the coating company Ionbond AG, Empa researchers sought out the cause of this detachment. For this, the researchers conducted detailed studies of the interface between the implant material and the coating. "When two materials are placed in contact with each other, the result is a reaction layer at the interface between them, which is only several atomic layers thick. Thus a new material is formed, which we investigated now for the first time", explains Roland Hauert of Empa's "Nanoscale Materials Science" laboratory.
His team showed that the so far barely considered reaction layer, which is not always completely corrosion resistant, is responsible for the detachment of the DLC layer. On the one hand, stress corrosion cracking occurred in the reaction layer. The mechanical load in conjunction with the penetration of body fluids led to slow-growing cracks, which in turn caused the DLC substrate to detach little by little.
In other cases, crevice corrosion was responsible for the damage. Over time, an aggressive, acidic medium develops in fine crevices and slowly dissolves the reaction layer or the additional adhesive layer, likewise leading to detachment.
Methods to determine operating lifetime
But the Empa team didn't stop there; together with their industry partners Synthes and Ionbond, they developed a corrosion-resistant intermediate layer at the interface to the DLC layer. What's more, the researchers also developed a process that can determine a crack’s growth rate under conditions similar to those experienced in the human body as well as the dissolution rate of the reaction layer in cases of crevice corrosion. "This then allows us to calculate the expected operating lifetime of the coated implant in the human body", says Roland Hauert. Whether or not a DLC-coated implant will fail prematurely in vivo can henceforth already be determined during the development of the product.
http://www.empa.ch/plugin/template/empa/3/*/---/l=2/changeLang=true/lartid=/orga=/type=/theme=/bestellbar=/new_abt=/uacc=
Wilkinson Sword supplied a razor with a blade cover some years ago and the blade lasted for months, however they soon stopped supplying the cover and even put flanges on their new blades so that the cover wouldn't fit any more. Got to keep the suckers buying!!
Woodworkers like me would LOVE and pay for seriously sharp blades for planes, planers, chisels, others. Useful life matters too.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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reeteshv
2 Comments
Challenges in commercialization...
1. Consumers may not be willing to pay upfront high prices
2. Consumers may feel it unhygienic to keep using the same personal care product for years
3. Pricing
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rsanchez1
213 Comments
Re: Challenges in commercialization...
In today's economically difficult world, that may not be the case. When a consumer is deciding between paying for one razor that will be good for years, or paying for dozens, maybe hundreds of razors in that same timespan, perhaps the consumer will prefer making a one-time payment if in the long-run it ends up being a lot cheaper than several small payments. Plus, these razors are synthetic diamond-coated, which should be more hygienic than standard razors.
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