Superelasticity

The term Superelasticity will be used on this wiki for the unusually high bendability/strainability of flawless nanoscale gemstone machine parts manufactured by advanced forms of mechanosynthesis. In short: The unusually high bendability of Crystolecules.

The basic building blocks for gemstone based nanomachinery are Crystolecules. They have an extremely low probability of containing at least one flaw like e.g. a misplaced atom. This is due to them being produced via advanced force applying mechanosynthesis. A digital process. Just like bit errors can be pushed to extreme rarity in digital data processing atom placing errors can too. (There are several ways to optimize for low error rate -- see dedicated page).

This flawlessness has the very desirable side effect that there are no unplanned spots where trapped non-relaxed pretension stresses reside and further stresses can concentrate and where cracks can start. Consequently gemstones can withstand very big strains (two digit percentage range) that are not possible with gemstones at the macroscopic scale. Such high strains are especially not possible with natural gemstones or todays (2018) thermodynamically produced synthetic gemstones.

Mechanosynthesized macroscopic slabs of gemstones (which may be pretty difficult to make btw (wiki-TODO: elaborate)) may start out flawless but very quickly acquire flaws from all kinds of radiation (UV, gamma, ...) even when heavily shielded (neutrinos)

Very small crystals can have flawless structure even when produced thermodynamically today. This may provide a way to test superelasticity experimentally today. But this seems difficult. For compression maybe clamp a crystal with a superhard monocrystalline nanoscale vice? But what to do for tension?? (TODO: check if there where experiments testing superelasticity)

(Sidenote: Thermodynamic synthesis of nanoscale gemstones gives almost no control of outer shape, internal strains and heterogenity. So crystolecules cannot be made that way.)

Misc notes

(TODO: Investigate the effect of isotope mixtures on superelasticity.)

Related

• High pressure
• Crystolecules
• Gemstone based metamaterial ("gem-gum")
• Stiffness
• Superlubrication ... another performance parameter that can be unusually elevated at the nanoscale