New "Metallic Wood" Is As Strong As Titanium But Much Lighter (dwell.com) 93
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."
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."
Hyperion Tree Ships coming (Score:5, Funny)
Just need to make some FTL engines
not a difficult question or surprising result (Score:1)
"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.
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You were doing great until you misused the word crystal. Come on, this isn't something hard like rocket surgery, or brain science.
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Not exactly brain surgery. [youtube.com]
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This sounds like a new type of syntactic foam [wikipedia.org].
An obvious application is in aviation and aerospace.
More like a sponge than wood (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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Well, no, particle board is not made of "particles" nor is it a "board", it's a pressed woodchip loaf without the structure of a board. Engineered LUMBER is the term, which is a double misnomer. Metallic wood is metal with wood-application structures to replace regular wood with metal.
Sorry you want to pick some nits but not others, it just doesn't work that way.
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More like a sponge than wood
Yeah, no shit. What's wood-like about it? So it has pores. My ass has pores.
Re:More like a sponge than wood (Score:4, Funny)
To be fair "New "Metallic Ass" Is As Strong As Titanium But Much Lighter" simply doesn't have quite the same sound to it.
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Re:Isn't Nickel biologically toxic? (Score:4, Informative)
"Five times lighter"cathode (Score:5, Interesting)
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That would be 0.8 times lighter, which does make sense.
Incidentally that is probably what the authors of TFA tried to say when they said 5 times lighter.
Re: "Five times lighter"cathode (Score:2)
You can measure how heavy something is, but how do you measure how light it is?
By means of an inverse, obviously. Funny how English-speaking people here are the only ones having comprehension problems with this. Somehow, everyone else grasps the concept readily.
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Wrong. D is 0.99 times lighter than A, 0.9875 times lighter than B, and 0.9833 times lighter than C.
Disagree? Then use unambiguous language.
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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."
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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...
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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.'
Re: "Five times lighter"cathode (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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!
Re: "Five times lighter"cathode (Score:2)
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Just what we need, prosthetic legs spontaneously catching on fire.
We TOTALLY need that. Think of the youtube videos....
Metallic Foam is ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Cool (Score:1)
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.
this might actually be real (Score:1)
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.
Expensive (Score:2)
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.
Metallic Wood As Strong As Titanium (Score:1)
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?
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Finally..... (Score:1)
The perfect material for ultra light ultralights.... imagine how much less they'll weight....
Light strong material used as a battery (Score:1)