Researchers have created a new kind of metal that rates as the world’s
lightest material — and just might show up in future batteries and shock
absorbers.
Figured this was a big article I could not pass up posting about.
Photo shows the new nickel-phosphorus lattice being so light it can sit on a ball of dandelion fluff and not disturbe it.
It consists of 99.99% air. The other 0.01% is made up of interconnected
hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanomeeters. 1,000x
thinner than a human hair.
I read about this yesterday and it was pretty interesting. I am curious how expensive it is to manufacture as well as what uses it will have. Lightweight and strong sounds great, but if it costs $1,000/inch to produce, it’ll only be used in military & government applications.
Well that’s sort of how everything starts out. As organizations like DoD, NASA, US Military etc develop new and innovative materials or concepts because they actually have the funding for it, they eventually get filtered down to common use once the manufacturing processes are developed.
Why not? They seem to have all new state of the art technology. All the carbon fiber on them because they need them so light weight. Well apparently this is Lightweight and durable… so why not use something lighter in weight on parts you can use them for.
Keep in mind the amount of money put into these cars as well.
An indy car weighs 1600lbs compared to an F1 car which weighs as little as 920lbs but that doesn’t really matter since all indy cars raced for the last 8 years were the 2003 model and weighed the same amount. Meaning that building it to reduce weight is completely unnecessary, every team has the same car. From this it should also be obvious that new cutting edge technology isn’t important if the Dallara IR-05 lasted 8 years why bother with new technology.
On top of the fact that Indy cars are not at all what the American perception of them but also the material itself doesn’t have any properties that would be particularly useful in a race car. Being light is completely useless unless matched with other favorable properties. For example, if it was light and strong, or light and impermeable, or light and cheap, or light and ???
The article does say “stong” but without giving the definition of “strong” in this application it doesn’t really explain much.
