SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I[m-waiting-for-it-to-be-transparent,-too dept.
Penn Engineers Develop Ultrathin, Ultralight 'Nanocardboard'
[A] team of Penn Engineers has demonstrated a new material they call "nanocardboard," an ultrathin equivalent of corrugated paper cardboard. A square centimeter of nanocardboard weighs less than a thousandth of a gram and can spring back into shape after being bent in half.
Nanocardboard is made out of an aluminum oxide film with a thickness of tens of nanometers, forming a hollow plate with a height of tens of microns. Its sandwich structure, similar to that of corrugated cardboard, makes it more than ten thousand times as stiff as a solid plate of the same mass.
Nanocardboard's stiffness-to-weight ratio makes it ideal for aerospace and microrobotic applications, where every gram counts. In addition to unprecedented mechanical properties, nanocardboard is a supreme thermal insulator, as it mostly consists of empty space.
Future work will explore an intriguing phenomenon that results from a combination of properties: shining a light on a piece of nanocardboard allows it to levitate. Heat from the light creates a difference in temperatures between the two sides of the plate, which pushes a current of air molecules out through the bottom.
Nanocardboard as a nanoscale analog of hollow sandwich plates (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06818-6) (DX)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 09 2018, @05:30PM (1 child)
I can think of a lot of useful applications. But one characteristic not mentioned is how it is much more susceptible to corrosion. This will need to be taken into account in any actual application. (Some applications may even find that a useful characteristic.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @03:40AM
> ...more susceptible to corrosion.
Are you sure about that? Seems to me that Al2O3 (aluminum oxide) is pretty darn stable, already fully oxidized into a ceramic and with a very high melting point.