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Science

New "Metallic Wood" Is As Strong As Titanium But Much Lighter (dwell.com) 93

Posted by EditorDavid from the not-so-heavy-metal dept.
Titanium "has long been touted as the metal of the future," writes Dwell, "due to its strength, rust resistance, and amazing lightness." But can careful atom-stacking lead to something better?

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a way to create a new "metallic wood" material that is as strong as titanium, but five times lighter, reports Dwell. "So far, the researchers have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that is almost 70 percent empty space... It was created by building tiny plastic spheres, suspending them in water, allowing the water to evaporate, and then electroplating the spheres with nickel. Researchers then dissolved the plastic spheres, producing an incredibly strong, porous metal that floats on water."
Researchers are also considering the possibility of filling its empty space with an energy-storing material. "For example, a prosthetic leg made from this material and infused with anode and cathode materials, could also be a battery."
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New "Metallic Wood" Is As Strong As Titanium But Much Lighter More

New "Metallic Wood" Is As Strong As Titanium But Much Lighter

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  • Hyperion Tree Ships coming (Score:5, Funny)

    by known_coward_69 ( 4151743 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @03:46PM (#58095942)

    Just need to make some FTL engines

  • "But can careful atom-stacking lead to something better? " - OBVIOUSLY? Regardless of any other factor of course. Aligned structures >strength> unaligned random structures. This isn't rocket science, this is a basic crystal lattice.
       

  • More like a sponge than wood (Score:5, Interesting)

    by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @03:54PM (#58095976)
    Metal sponges are already a thing, only difference between this material and existing metal sponges is the pore size and creation method. This method described is somewhat similar to the way that aerogels are produced. These metal sponges aren't like wood...wood is a composite that derives much of its strength from its fibrous grain.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's just a different grain structure. Wood is organically deposited along sap channels. Metal foams are sprayed all at once without that structure development. Micro-deposition into a synthetic grain structure could be much stronger.

      A composite in a metallic-crystalline structure that self-aligns into a rigid-yet-ductile form at a certain temp/pressure/catalyst, etc, that's the grail. It follows that atomic deposition is going to make stronger bonds than macro-deposits.

      • Correct, and furthers my point that describing it as "metallic wood" is both misleading and inaccurate.

    • More like a sponge than wood

      Yeah, no shit. What's wood-like about it? So it has pores. My ass has pores.

    • If they can figure out how to get the air out of the pockets we might be able to make floating (in the air) cities.

  • "Five times lighter"cathode (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bradmont ( 513167 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @03:59PM (#58096004) Homepage
    When did measures like "five times lighter" and "100 times smaller" become accepted? Comparisons don't work that way...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gumpish ( 682245 )

      This bugs me as well.

      "10 times slower"
      "Twice as cold"
      "20% thinner"

      It's all nonsense. The marketing types sure didn't help when they decided to start saying shit like "This laptop is just 0.75 inches thin."

      • There's nothing wrong in principle with "20% thinner"; it means the original thickness reduced by 20%, or 80% as thick.

        I agree that the other examples are nonsense, though. "Five times lighter" would be a negative weight (the original weight minus five times the original weight), and the same goes for "10 times slower". Unless they've figured out anti-gravity or time travel...

        • Journalists are seldom drained in maths, mechanics or physics. Just think how many articles on the electricity industry describe a power station's capacity in 'megawatts per day,' or the ill-defined unit of 'enough power for 100,000 houses.'

        • I agree that the other examples are nonsense, though. "Five times lighter" would be a negative weight (the original weight minus five times the original weight)

          Why the hell would it mean anything else than weight diminished by a factor of five? Even just common sense tells you it can't possibly be negative weight anyway, since there's no such thing. I swear you Americans are just trolling the rest of the world with this shit, since nobody else has any comprehension problems with that.

          • Why ... would it mean anything else than weight diminished by a factor of five?

            Because if they'd meant that they would have said either "80% lighter than" or "one-fifth as heavy as". Phrases of the form "X times less than Y" (including "lighter than", "smaller than", etc.) are a literal translation of the formula "Y - (X * Y)" into natural language.

            Unless perhaps you're defining "lightness" idiosyncratically as the reciprocal of weight, in which case "5 times lighter" really would equal "one-fifth as heavy". That's the difference between "X times as conductive" and "X times as resisti

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Of course it makes sense: 5 times lighter means it's clearly negative 4 times the density of titanium. And if it costs 3 times less, hell, they'll pay you twice the cost of titanium to take it off their hands!

    • Of course they work this way just fine. Why wouldn't they?

  • Metallic Foam is ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by pz ( 113803 ) on Saturday February 09, 2019 @04:33PM (#58096164) Journal

    Metallic foam is already well understood.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    https://www.tms.org/pubs/journ... [tms.org]

    (see especially Figure 4 on that page which REALLY looks like metallic wood; the stuff in the article doesn't so much)

    What makes the the linked article interesting is the novel manufacturing method.

  • This looks like the micro/nano version of making a pseudo-foam metal by casting in salts and later dissolving the salts.

    Laminated between sheets of metal, I'd expect this to kick ass.

  • I can't remember the last time one of these sorts of PR articles from a University research lab actually made me think it might mean something.

    The idea behind this is solid (BTW, is this comparable in a general way to aerogels ?), it's a matter of finding a scalable manufacturing method.

  • I skimmed the second citation. I may have missed a critical portion, but it looks like they're using a nickel-rhenium alloy. Rhenium is rare in the earth (about 1 part per billion) and not cheap.

    They're not going to be using this stuff to make car bodies or skyscrapers.

  • I'm stealing that title for my Robocop fanfic.

    On a more serious note: won't the tiny plastic spheres embedded in the electroplated metals be a giant source of microplastics and turn into an environmental disaster during the recycling process?

  • The perfect material for ultra light ultralights.... imagine how much less they'll weight....

  • At the more raucous parties back in the day, we'd joke about someone's leg being on fire and then douse it with whatever beverage we were drinking. If this material were used for prosthetic purposes, the gag could become reality. A lithium fueled amputation wouldn't be pleasant, though, I'd expect.

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