The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 37 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover an invention that Apple acquired from a liquidmetal Technologies Inc. competitor that covers the creation of customized metallic glass alloys for high end consumer products.

Granted Patent: Methods for Shaping High Aspect Ratio Articles from Metallic Glass Alloys using Rapid Capacitive Discharge and Metallic Glass Feedstock for use in such methods

Today, Patently Apple was first to discover that Apple has been granted a patent that they acquired from a Pasadena California company called Glassimetal Technology, Inc. One of the inventors on Apple's patent is noted as being Marios Demetriou, Co-Founder of Glassimetal Technology. The company develops new classes of liquid metal or 'metallic glass alloys' such as GlassiNickel, GlassiZirconium, GlassiGold, GlassiPlatinum, GlassiPalladium and more.

Apple's newly granted patent covers an invention relating to methods and metallic glass alloy feedstock that are capable of being shaped into high aspect ratio articles using rapid capacitive discharge forming.

In some embodiments, the shaped article is a component of a consumer electronics device, a watch component, a medical implant, a dental prosthetic, a ferromagnetic core, a sporting good, or a luxury good.

Apple's patent FIG. 3 provides images of parts produced in two RCDF molding experiments using metallic glass alloys.

Apple's granted patent 9,845,523 was originally filed in Q1 2014 and granted by USPTO today. You could check out the details of the invention here.

Apple had exclusive rights to Liquidmetal Technologies until 2016. Patently Apple covered Apple's first extension to 2015 here. With no news of Apple extending their agreement with Liquidmetal Technologies past 2016, it was interesting to find a connection to Glassimetal. Whether Apple has any further relationship with Glassimetal is unknown at this time.

One of the charts from Glassimetal, as noted below, shows that their GlassiNickel provides a 'Hardness' Factor that's superior to Liquidmetal's LM 105.

Patently Apple presents only a brief summary of granted patents with associated graphics for journalistic news purposes as each Granted Patent is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any Granted Patent should be read in its entirety for full details. About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus.