Materials From Tough-as-Nails Crustacean Could Inspire Better Body Armor 144
carmendrahl writes "The peacock mantis shrimp, a crustacean which is neither a mantis nor a shrimp, has hammer-like clubs for smashing the shells of its prey. They're so strong that regular glass aquariums can't hold them. But what's interested researchers for some time is how the clubs stand up to all that stress. Now, a team has figured out why: the mantis shrimp club's molecular structure is set up to resist fractures. That discovery could lead to stronger and lighter car frames or body armor."
Re:Stronger, lighter cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
In some specific situations yes, but in others the occupant is perfectly fine but did thousands of dollars of Damage to their car.
And making a car more bullet resistant is in high demand from many sectors.
Stronger car frames? (Score:3, Insightful)
The very point of a car frame is to crumple. They're expensive to replace, but not as much as the driver.
Re:Stronger, lighter cars? (Score:2, Insightful)
You assume the manufacturing process does not cause more damage to the environment than the weight saving offsets. Same as how buying a Prius is worse for the environment than buying a used (or even many new non-hybrid) cars due to the manufacturing process.
Re:Stronger, lighter cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. We have already passed the point on the strength axis at which the car survives but the occupants die of internal injuries. For cars, what you need is energy absorption to decelerate the car's contents gradually. That means a body that will crumple.
Body armor, perhaps. Here, the total energy of a typical round is not lethal if it can be spread over a large area of the body. This can be facilitated by stiff materials backed by some padding.
Seems like 'stiff materials backed by some padding' might describe the optimal car design also: an impact-absorbing outer layer (crumple zone), inside of which is an extremely hard shell to prevent debris penetrating and crushing the passenger. On impact, the passenger strapped within the inner shell decelerates by crumpling the outer layer, without the inner layer's being breached by debris, or the passenger's needing to decelerate within the context of the inner layer. In such a model, you would want to make the inner shell as hard as possible. You might even be able to make an even flimsier outer layer if you could make the inner layer harder, resulting in less abrupt deceleration when using harder material.
Re:Stronger, lighter cars? (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't change any of: :more marketable, more ecofriendly and more regulatory friendly" though.
Unless you interprete "ecofriendly" to be "better for the evironment" rather than "better for the owners feelings about the environment" of course.
Paid Subscription (Score:2, Insightful)
Kinda worthless linking an article the requires a paid subscription to access.
Cool Natural Materials... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lots of natural materials exhibit really interesting properties, sometimes at odds with the way we'd expect such materials to react. For example crustacean shells are ceramic but quite tough because of the layering of the ceramic with small amounts of organic binder material which causes any fractures to be diverted before they spread though the bulk of the material.
Many natural materials exhibit high levels of hierarchy like this and it's one of the many reasons why natural structures and materials are way cooler than most of the things that we make, with the possible exception of aerogel. One of the most interesting hierarchical structures is Euplectella Aspergillum (Venus' flower basket [wikipedia.org]), its structure is really complex [nhm.ac.uk]. I can easily see this being an aerospace material in 10 years...
Re:Stronger, lighter cars? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here, these should do the job:
http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/case_studies/hummer_vs_prius.pdf [pacinst.org]
http://web.archive.org/web/20070714131759/http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Transportation/T07-01_DustToDust.pdf [archive.org]
Re:Stronger, lighter cars? (Score:2, Insightful)
And that's because the cost of a broken arm is externalized to other agents, so it appears to be less costly than the car damage.
Even so, why value a thing over your own health?