Tuesday, November 29, 2011

If I had a Nickel...

Researchers at HRL Laboratories, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine have created what they say is the lowest-density material, a lattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel.

Its volume is 99.99 percent air, and its density is 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter--not including the air in or between its tubes. That density is less than one-thousandth that of water...

"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometers, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said Tobias Schaedler, the HRL researcher who's lead author of the paper...




After a 50 percent compression, it rebounds to 98 percent its original height...

The lattice is constructed through several steps... beams of ultraviolet light shine through a holes in a mask into a reservoir containing a resin that forms polymer fibers when the light hits it. 

The fibers follow the path the light takes, and using multiple beams creates multiple interconnected fibers.

Next, the rest of the resin is washed away, the polymer fibers are coated with a very thin layer of nickel, and the polymer fibers are then dissolved, leaving only the metal lattice.

Source.

1 comment:

  1. Cool, I found a blogger error. I am officially posting from the future!

    ReplyDelete