World's Lightest Material Imitates Architecture of Modern Buildings
A new breakthrough in science was uncovered this week when a group of scientists in California said they developed the lightest material in the world, about 100 times lighter than Styrofoam.
The new material developed by researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology imitates the architectural concept of modern buildings like the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge in the nano and micro scales. The material consists of 99.9 percent air and 0.01 percent of solid.
"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said lead researcher Dr. Tobias Schaedler of HRL, according to a press release Thursday.
William Carter, manager of the architected materials group at the HRL, explained that in the larger scale, modern buildings like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture.
"We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales," he said in the press release.
According to researchers, the new material could be used for battery electrodes and acoustic, vibration or shock energy absorption. This last application is important for automobile and motorcycle suspensions, aircraft landing gear and for structural engineering to reduce damage of structures after an earthquake.
The new material is also a breakthrough of unprecedented mechanical behavior for a metal. Researchers explain the material can recover completely from compression exceeding 50 percent strain and extraordinarily high energy absorption.
"Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale," explained UCI mechanical and aerospace engineer Lorenzo Valdevit, UCI's principal investigator on the project.
"Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the micro-lattice and you have a unique cellular material," he added.
Watch: The Lightest Structure Ever