In many European countries the controlled biological treatment of organic solid waste is a suitable method in waste management. Technical prerequisites such as collection and separation systems for household waste often exist and sufficient treatment facilities for controlled aerobic composting or even anaerobic digestion are available. Space for landfill is scarce and therefore expensive in many industrial countries and biotreatment is much cheaper than incineration. The advantage of composting compared to other waste treatment techniques is not only the relatively low costs but also the technical reasons. An obvious example is the direct disposal of packaging with alimentary residues and the subsequent biological treatment. Not only green waste from gardens or biowaste from kitchens can be treated, but any compostable material is in principle suitable, for example waste from the food industry or packaging and packaging materials made from paper, cardboard, wood, or biodegradable plastics. Biological treatment has already become a good way of meeting, for example, Germany legislative targets to reduce and recycle garbage.

Prerequisites for controlled biological treatment are suitable technical facilities plus standards and directives for waste management. An example is the European packaging directive which harmonizes national measures concerning the management of packaging and packaging waste. The aim is to prevent any impact of the use of packaging on the environment or to reduce such an impact. For applying this directive and any similar regulations, it is important to have clear definitions, standardized test methods, and suitable evaluation criteria to identify biodegradable packaging materials and to differentiate compostable from noncompostable packaging materials which can commonly be used and the results of which are accepted by all parties concerned.

For decades scientists have accepted the premise that solid matter can only order in two ways: amorphous (or glassy) like window glass or crystalline with atoms arranged according to translational symmetry. The science of crystallography, now two centuries old, was able to relate in a simple and efficient way all atomic positions within a crystal to a frame of reference in which a single unit cell was defined. Positions within the crystal could all be deduced from the restricted number of positions in the unit cell by translations along vectors formed by a combination of integer numbers of unit vectors of the reference frame. Of course disorder, which is always present in solids, could be understood as some form of disturbance with respect to this rule of construction. Also amorphous solids were naturally referred to as a full breakdown of translational symmetry yet preserving most of the short-range order around atoms. Incommensurate structures, or more simply modulated crystals, could be understood as the overlap of various ordering potentials not necessarily with commensurate periodicities.

For so many years, no exception to the canonical rule of crystallography was discovered. Any crystal could be completely described using one unit cell and its set of three basis vectors. In 1848 the French crystallographer Bravais demonstrated that only 14 different ways of arranging atoms exist in three-dimensional space according to translational symmetry. This led to the well-known cubic, hexagonal, tetragonal, and associated structures. Furthermore the dihedral angle between pairs of faces of the unit cell cannot assume just any number since an integer number of unit cells must completely fill space around an edge.

The mid 1980s benefited from three major scientific announcements that altered our world view on the structure of matter and its properties. These were the discovery of quasiperiodic crystals (QCs), which are commonly referred to as quasicrystals (1984), fullerenes (1985), and high-temperature superconductivity (1986). The discovery of QC was announced to a community active in the mature science of crystallography. Crystallographers, and other scientists who studied the structure of matter and its defects, relied on a series of laws and paradigms undisputed since von Laue performed his first x-ray-diffraction experiments in 1912. One leading paradigm stated that the atomic structure of a crystal is ordered and periodic. Explanations of this paradigm, based on common sense, could be summarized as, “It is periodic because it is ordered.”

Periodicity implies a set of specific rules, among them the allowed rotational symmetries—namely one-, two-, three-, four-, and sixfold. Fivefold rotational symmetry is excluded. Past textbooks specified this, stating that fivefold rotational symmetry is impossible in periodic structures. Other books stated the impossibility of such symmetry in crystals.

Paradigms are based on experience rather than on a rigorous, scientific study process. Therefore when proven wrong, they are difficult to uproot. From 1912 to 1984, nothing shook the paradigm, “Order in crystals is periodicity.” Incommensurate structures challenged the paradigm for a while but were soon found to be a modulation of periodic crystals, saving the paradigm. However in the background, a series of articles broadened the scope of crystallography into hyperspace and prepared the mathematical platform from which the science of quasiperiodicity in crystals could take off.

Hundreds of new alloys have been observed to form quasicrystalline phases. Now it is clear that quasicrystals are not at all a rarity but in fact are quite common. Many quasicrystalline phases are metastable, but some are stable. The discoveries of stable quasicrystalline alloys have led to a breakthrough in the understanding of quasicrystalline structure and have established a new group of quasicrystalline materials. In this article, alloy systems that form quasicrystals and their preparation techniques are reviewed.

Quasicrystals (QCs) exhibit unusual physical properties that are significantly different from those of crystalline materials and are not expected for alloys consisting of normal metallic elements. Opposite to conventional metallic alloys, their thermal conductivity and diffusivity are unusually low (with a positive temperature coefficient)—practically that of an insulator—which is atypical for materials containing about 70-at.% aluminum. Moreover the thermal conductivity decreases when the structural perfection is improved. One observes a low, if any, electronic contribution to the heat capacity and thus a vanishing density of electronic states at the Fermi level.

The origin of this unexpected behavior was first attributed to the existence of a deep pseudogap at the Fermi level with a localization tendency of electrons near the Fermi level.However experimental evidence led to an alternative approach related to the structure of quasicrystals. In QCs, well-defined atomic clusters form self-similar subsets of the structure over which electronic and vibrational states are expected to extend. According to the inflation symmetry of the icosahedral structure, the so-called recurrent localization effects may then explain the conduction behavior and other striking features of quasicrystals (e.g., brittleductile transition at high temperature, corrosion resistance, low friction, high hardness).

In the following, we first present the main thermal properties of quasicrystalline alloys compared to those of conventional materials with an emphasis on the variation of the thermal conductivity with temperature. The combination of such peculiar conduction, mechanical, and tribological properties gives the quasicrystalline alloys a technological interest for applications where superficial thermal and mechanical conditions are of prime importance. This is illustrated with two examples involving a QC coating on a base Al substrate: (1) thermal insulation for which a low conductivity is needed and (2) quenching heat-transfer modification due to a low-effusivity superficial effect. These processes are then explained in the third part of this article in terms of the cluster-modes delocalization mechanism responsible for the low conductivity of the quasicrystals.

A variety of opportunities to develop technological applications of quasicrystals is being considered. Several of these are discussed in this issue. A common feature of many proposed applications is that they involve surface or near-surface interactions. Information about the surface structure, composition, and chemistry is prerequisite to understanding the origin of the desirable traits of quasicrystals. For instance, basic issues of surface structure—whether quasicrystals are intrinsically rough or flat, quasicrystalline or not quasicrystalline—impact directly on our understanding of their surface thermodynamic, electronic, and chemical properties.

The key to engineering a material lies in exploiting its beneficial characteristics while minimizing its inherent weaknesses. Whether the weakness is, for example, poor corrosion resistance or low hardness, applying a relatively thin coating of another material that mitigates the shortcoming of the underlying material is a practical solution allowing the composite pieces to be used in demanding environments. This method has been utilized in a wide variety of cases ranging from paint on wooden fences and ceramic thermal barriers on single-crystal superalloy turbine blades to tungsten carbide hard-facing layers on drilling equipment. Some materials may suffer from high cost and therefore are used as a thin layer to impart their desired properties. For instance, gold leaf is applied to buildings for appearance while diamond films are deposited onto normal cutting tools to improve their performance. The specific application typically dictates both the material and the deposition method for the coating. The gold leaf does not need to offer much resistance to abrasion or mechanical stress in order to maintain its beautiful shine far into the future. In contrast the diamond film must be strongly adhered to the underlying cutting tool surface if it is to survive the punishing wear and thermal stresses of machining operations.

Scientists have studied the mechanical properties of quasicrystalline materials for quite some time. However the difficulty in obtaining material of reasonable quality hampered systematic investigations. The progress in materials preparation in recent years has triggered new activity in this field. Furthermore the new ternary and multicomponent alloys have demonstrated great promise for use as coatings with good wear resistance and low coefficients of sliding friction. However the physical reasons for these properties and their correlation with the particular structure of quasicrystals are still not understood. As in conventional alloys, experiments under well-defined conditions are required that can serve as a basis for understanding the intrinsic mechanical properties of quasicrystals. Such studies are now increasingly possible after the development of techniques to grow larger single quasicrystals up to a few centimeters in size directly from the melt.

Since the mechanical behavior of quasicrystalline alloys is to a great extent determined by a brittle-to-ductile transition at about 70% of the absolute melting temperature, it is useful to discuss the mechanical properties with reference to appropriately defined low-temperature and high-temperature regions.

Quasicrystals may have important applications as new technological materials. In particular, work in our laboratory has shown that some quasicrystals may be useful as hydrogen-storage materials.

Some transition metals have a capacity to store hydrogen to a density exceeding that of liquid hydrogen. Such systems allow for basic investigations of solid-state phenomena such as phase transitions, atomic diffusion, and electronic structure. They may also be critical materials for the future energy economy. The depletion of the world's petroleum reserves and the increased environmental impact of conventional combustion-engine powered automobiles are leading to renewed interest in hydrogen. TiFe hydrides have already been used as storage tanks for stationary nonpolluting hydrogen internal-combustion engines. Nickel metal-hydride batteries are commonly used in a wide range of applications, most notably as power sources for portable electronic devices—particularly computers. The light weight and low cost of titanium-transition-metal alloys offer significant advantages for such applications. Unfortunately they tend to form stable hydrides, which prevents the ready desorption of the stored hydrogen for the intended use.

Some titanium/zirconium quasicrystals have a larger capacity for reversible hydrogen storage than do competing crystalline materials. Hydrogen can be loaded from the gas phase at temperatures as low as room temperature and from an electrolytic solution. The hydrogen goes into solution in the quasicrystal structure, often avoiding completely the formation of undesirable crystalline hydride phases. The proven ability to reversibly store variable quantities of hydrogen in a quasicrystal not only points to important areas of application but also opens the door to previously inaccessible information about the structure and dynamics of this novel phase. Selected results illustrating these points appear briefly here.