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posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 01 2019, @06:57PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:22PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:22PM (#795134)

    If you understand what was said, why ask for clarification?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:31PM (#795140)

    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)

    by optotronic (4285) on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:09AM (#795291)

    You mean it weighs 20-25% of what the original did?

    If you understand what was said, why ask for clarification?

    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

      by shortscreen (2252) on Saturday February 02 2019, @10:39AM (#795354) Journal

      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?)