Coining less expensive currency: Bringing down the cost of making nickels
MikeInFL
Posts: 10,188 ✭✭✭✭
Date: June 21, 2018
Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Summary: Cashing in on materials science, makes a new nickel for use in the U.S. Mint. The work might be useful for building durable high-tech devices like smartphones, too.
Nickels are ubiquitous in American life, tumbling around in pockets, rolling under car seats, and emerging from the back of dryers to be used over and over for countless purchases. But these resilient and somewhat humble-looking coins are also becoming costly to produce. Nickel, the coin's own namesake, has become a prized ingredient in many modern products, pushing the market value so much that sometimes making the five-cent coin costs as much as seven cents a pop.
Working in conjunction with the U.S. Mint, a research team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has identified an alternative approach that would reduce the cost of materials for the nickel by as much as 40 percent. This approach would produce a coin every bit as tough and reliable as the old nickel but also every bit as familiar to the American citizen.
The paper that details the work was published today in the journal Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation.
As an added benefit, the data from this research has also produced results that may aid high-tech companies looking for new materials to use in resilient electronics such as phones and laptops, and in a variety of radical new colors, to boot.
The manufacturing of coins is a complicated and demanding process. Coins must not corrode in the palm of a moist hand, for example. The images stamped on their faces must be resilient enough to withstand decades of commerce and the occasional turn through the laundry. Their metallic sheen must always be recognizable, and of uniform thickness and density.
Although invisible to the average customer buying a gumball or a soda, all U.S. coins must also contain a predetermined amount of electrical conductivity to work in vending machines, which use a small meter to determine a coin's currency signature. A parking meter or soda machine won't count your nickel without this key characteristic.
In many ways the nickel-production challenge was an ideal match for the NIST Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), which was started in 2011 with the ambitious goal of decreasing the time it takes a new material to reach market by at least half while keeping costs low. The MGI has been building the computational and IT tools needed for the development of all kinds of new materials for use in a wide variety of manufacturing applications.
"Rethinking the nickel was one of the first times we were able to deploy the new MGI tools to design a material for a specific application," said NIST scientist Carelyn Campbell. "We were very pleased with the results."
Read the rest here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180621172507.htm
Comments
That's interesting
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Great article, and it shows what can be accomplished with the scientific approach. Now, with a dedicated effort (such as this one), and using AI, can grading standards and computer grading be far behind? Sometimes I think that many do not want to see real standards developed... since that would take all the fun and continuous debate out of the grading game....
Cheers, RickO
Thanks for posting
Time Marches on and with it comes inflation. Thanks fiat money.
Now, how can we get some of the test patterns?
R PUUESLIB MUNU
Pacific Northwest Numismatic Association
Very interesting. This is the first practical discussion of a potential new metal I have seen that does not fall back on the easy but problematic suggestion to use steel. (Steel would make our nickels indistinguishable from Canada and other 5 dent coins which are worth less than 5 US cents.
And I want one of those test coins. What are the chances I might get one in a new roll of nickels?
As the work was done by a government employee on government time, why is the article behind a paywall? A 40$ paywall at that...
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Author: 3rd Edition of the SampleSlabs book, https://sampleslabs.info/
Alloy of copper, nickel and zinc. To reduce cost by 40% it has to be nearly entirely zinc - possibly a Cu-Ni clad on zn core.
I see the new the new Druid religious motto, Tr Swn Ot Iudec, is on the test piece, too. That's the only meaningful things Congress has done in months!
Tens of thousands of research articles resulting from government-funded research are published in a variety of scientific and technical journals every year. Most of these journals are published by commercial publishers with varying internet access options. Some are free, some are not.
The pardon is for tyrants. They like to declare pardons on holidays, such as the birthday of the dictator, or Christ, or the Revolution. Dictators should be encouraged to keep it up. And we should be encouraged to remember that the promiscuous dispensation of clemency is not a sign of political liberality. It is instead one of those valuable, identifying marks of tyranny.
Charles Krauthammer
It kind of amazes me that with all the waste, fraud and abuse in government spending, that the mint is one of the few public entities concerned with cutting cost. I suppose only on the product quality, not likely the mint bureaucracy. Good on them, I guess.
In reality, waste, fraud and abuse in state and federal governments is much less than in public and private corporations -- the businesses simply do not have to report any of it, except on the largest scale.
I don't need a nickel or penny to spend. I consider this a huge waste of taxpayer funds. But I suppose there is some miniscule minority of some pitiful human being that demands politicians spend their hard earned money. And I doubt a workable final coin could possibly be somewhat attractive as the pattern shown. It would be gummed up with the most obnoxious politically correct design they could push through.
With rounding of cash transactions, neither the cent nor nickel have any meaningful purpose. Over a year of cash payments a person might end up a few cents ahead or behind - can;t buy "penny candy" or a gum ball for that.
Rather than the expense of tooling for a new alloy and recovery of metals from waste, it would be much more economical to eliminate all cent and nickel coin production; then redesign the dime and quarter with Liberty portraits and better reverses, and introduce a $5 coin. The coins would then be 10-cents, 25 cents, one dollar and five dollars.
True, but it seems any politician who proposes this is accused of causing price inflation or stealing from the poor or some garbage like that.
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About 2 years ago, I got permission from a local 7-11 to spend a day observing how people handled coins and other money-forms. It was a very un-scientific activity, but here's what I noticed. The 7-11 - at my request for the day - rounded down all cash purchases to the nearest cent -- a 94 cent purchase was 90 cents; a 96 cent purchase was 95 cents, etc. I also watched what people did with coins and other things once they left the store.
No one received one-cent coins in change that day, and I saw no one toss a "penny" on the parking lot asphalt. This was contrary to casual observations where people got rid of cents almost routinely.
In the store, at the end of the day, I paid the manager just over $1 to cover rounding down. Most transactions were credit/debit cards. This is all just empirical, but maybe we really should consider a rational coinage.
I agree, Roger. No need for anything smaller than the dime. I would think, tho, that the addition of 50c and $2.50 coins would work, with the 25c and 50c reduced in size and perhaps bi-metallic for the $2.50 and $5 coins, much as other countries have done. I also think that a $10 coin might be considered. I know this would necessitate a re-tooling of vending machines. That alone would make it a tough sell.
The vending industry would kill anything requiring even a very modest change -- unless they see profits.....Profit might be improved by eliminating paper currency acceptance mechanisms --- those things are responsible for a majority of service calls, and customer frustration.
And also thru the usage of the $1 and $5 coins.
That would make cents, but if so, just dispense with coins totally and have "paper" money with the 10 cent being the smallest denomination. No more coin purses, not loose change, no coin slots or coinstar.
After traveling in countries that have basically done away with coins, it is easy to get used to a No Coin system.
Any coin from $1 up must be bi-metalic. The mint has to join the 21st century with the other countries of the world..