The lost secret of the Damascus steel, the strongest material of antiquity

In Europe, the first to learn about it were the Crusaders: steel was light and strong.
The formula of its production was secret. And it was precisely this secrecy that condemned it to oblivion.

Is it possible to " un-invent" something? The answer, perhaps, is yes. The best example is precisely the Damascus steel, the legendary material used by numerous knights of the past, including the Crusaders, whose formula is still unknown, lost as a secret in the past. Many, in recent years, have tried to reproduce it. Some are convinced they have succeeded, but not everyone agrees.

The leading scientific journal "ChemElectroChem" dedicates the cover of its n. 7 issue to a research entitled "X-Ray Microscopy: A Non-Destructive Multi-Scale Imaging to Study the Inner Workings of Batteries," carried out as part of the iENTRANCE project, at the new CNIS laboratories in Sapienza. Authors: Dr. Flavio Cognigni, Professor Mauro Pasquali, Dr. Francesca Anna Scaramuzzo, and Professor Marco Rossi of ICI-SBAI.

"X-ray microscopy (XRM) is a non-destructive characterization technique that provides quantitative information regarding the morphology/composition of the specimen and allows to perform multiscale and multimodal 2D/3D experiments exploiting the radiation-matter interactions. XRM is particularly suitable to afford in situ images of inner parts of a battery and for the early diagnosis of its degradation in a non-invasive way.