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from the i-won't-make-the-dirty-joke-about-robots dept.
Penn Engineer's 'Metallic Wood' Has the Strength of Titanium and the Density of Water
High-performance golf clubs and airplane wings are made out of titanium, which is as strong as steel but about twice as light. These properties depend on the way a metal's atoms are stacked, but random defects that arise in the manufacturing process mean that these materials are only a fraction as strong as they could theoretically be. An architect, working on the scale of individual atoms, could design and build new materials that have even better strength-to-weight ratios.
In a new study published in Nature Scientific Reports [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-36901-3], researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and the University of Cambridge have done just that. They have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that make it as strong as titanium but four to five times lighter.
The empty space of the pores, and the self-assembly process in which they're made, make the porous metal akin to a natural material, such as wood.
And just as the porosity of wood grain serves the biological function of transporting energy, the empty space in the researchers' "metallic wood" could be infused with other materials. Infusing the scaffolding with anode and cathode materials would enable this metallic wood to serve double duty: a plane wing or prosthetic leg that's also a battery.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday February 01 2019, @07:21PM (5 children)
You mean it weighs 20-25% of what the original did?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:22PM (3 children)
If you understand what was said, why ask for clarification?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:31PM
Article author here, we simply delight in searching references to our work so we can see the confusion. High level trolling if you will.
(Score: 1) by optotronic on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:09AM (1 child)
He asks because he's not sure. The statement doesn't make sense to those of us who were trained in grade school that "times" as a math operation means multiplication. Is this new math, or has "lightness" been formally defined since my math and physics classes?
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday February 02 2019, @10:39AM
It's awkward in prose, but mathematically "lightness" could be the reciprocal of heaviness (or in this case, density). Like conductance is the reciprocal of resistance. And when you don't want to use division in your rasterizer to interpolate depth values between verteces, you use a 1/Z buffer (shallowness buffer?)
(Score: 1) by j-beda on Saturday February 02 2019, @05:36PM
I also hate it when people use math comparisons for physical descriptions that are actually the absence of things rather than actual things. There is something called "heat", while "cold" is its absence. "Darkness"/"shadow" is the absence of light or brightness. "Lightness" is the lack of the real thing called weight. Thus, these are "privatives" in a physical sense, only having meaning as an absence of the real thing.
Describing something as being twice as cold, three times as dark, or 50% lighter does not make much sense, since each of these "things" is really a negative and it is ambiguous how to do the math when using a fractional/multiplicative comparison.
Given A weighs 3 pounds. B weights 1 pound.
Most people agree on the meaning of these statements:
A is two pounds heavier than B.
B is two pounds lighter than A.
A is three times heavier than B.
B is one third as heavy as A.
"Lighter" is consistent when talking about addition and subtraction, but not so much when talking about multiplication and division:
Is B three times lighter than A or since it is two pounds lighter is it twice as light? What is the number that "lightness" is measured by? What number when associated with A, when multiplied by three gives a consistent number for B?
I suppose we could measure "lightness" in inverse pounds, so:
Given A weighs 3 pounds. B weights 1 pound.
A has a lightness of 1/3 inverse pounds. B has a lightness of 1 inverse pound. So A has less "lightness" than B.
B is three times lighter than A.
A is one thirds as light as B.
But now we have these awkward constrictions:
B is 2/3 of an inverse pound lighter than A.
A is 2/3 of an inverse pound heavier than B.
But does anyone really think of lightness in terms of inverse pounds? Why would we want to do math in "inverse pounds"?
Avoid comparing "lightness", "coldness" and "darkness"! Use "weight", "heat", and "brightness" which are the real things!
On a slightly related topic, we often talk about fuel consumption in miles-per-gallon when we should be using gallons-per-mile. Miles-per-gallon is not a consumption rate, it is a range measurement.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=257 [bunniestudios.com]