Lighter even than aerogels, a lattice structure of joined tubes with a bulk density of 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimeter. Fark: the material is metal. Ultrafark: the material is *nickel,* which is a fairly dense metal.
Super-light lattice packs heavy-duty potential
And it turns out that the manufacturing process is fairly easy. A block of liquid resin is repeatedly zapped with criss-crossing laser beams of very small diameter. The laser beams cause the resin to cure, forming a mass of intersecting “hairs”. This is then coated with a 100 nanometer layer of nickel. The resin is then chemically dissolved away, leaving just the nickel shell… a series of connected thin-walled tubes.
Usefully, the material is “springy.” it can be compressed to 50% thickness, then rebound to 98%.
8 Responses to “New Lightest Material”
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Given that nickle can take a bit of heat, ultra light impact resistant heat shield?
Seems a little dubious. When you get material thicknesses easily measured in multiples of molecules, the response to elevated temperature is different than the bulk material. Really thin membranes of high-temperature material can evaporate at temperatures that bulky blocks of the stuff would just shrug off.
Still… it’s worth a look. Especially if they can make the same sort of thing out of other materials or especially alloys. TZM “aerogel” might make an interesting backing for thin refractory metal skins.
Fogbank??
It might do interesting things to the initial neutron flux… maybe something good, maybe something bad.
Fill ’em with vacuum and stuff balloons!
I’ve seen aerogel float. A block of some aerogel had a thin plastic skin, and was filled witha low density gas (the documentary said nitrogen, but I really doubt that), and the resulting blocks bulk density was approximately that of air. It was neutrally bouyant.
I’m not sure just how strong this new material is. Skin it over, and pump out the air, it might just collapse. It seems springy rather than rigid.
Perhaps a skin for rigid airships then. If nothing else, this might be a nice way to model the Cygnus vessel from the Disney movie The Black Hole…
[…] than a year ago, the lightest structural material in the world was announced… a metallic lattice of tiny nickel tubes. Now, it’s been beaten by something half a […]