Shock-dissipating fractal cubes could forge high-tech armor:
Tiny, 3-D printed cubes of plastic, with intricate fractal voids built into them, have proven to be effective at dissipating shockwaves, potentially leading to new types of lightweight armor and structural materials effective against explosions and impacts.
"The goal of the work is to manipulate the wave interactions resulting from a shockwave," said Dana Dattelbaum, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on a paper to appear in the journal AIP Advances. "The guiding principles for how to do so have not been well defined, certainly less so compared to mechanical deformation of additively manufactured materials. We're defining those principles, due to advanced, mesoscale manufacturing and design."
Shockwave dispersing materials that take advantage of voids have been developed in the past, but they typically involved random distributions discovered through trial and error. Others have used layers to reverberate shock and release waves. Precisely controlling the location of holes in a material allows the researchers to design, model and test structures that perform as designed, in a reproducible way.
The researchers tested their fractal structures by firing an impactor into them at approximately 670 miles per hour. The structured cubes dissipated the shocks five times better than solid cubes of the same material.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday July 09 2020, @10:18AM (2 children)
670 miles per hour is about 300m/s. Which is subsonic in air, even more so in solid media.
No info about the weight of the impactor, no info about the thickness or the materials they used for their "fractal cubes", not even a DOI!!! (which is currently TBD even at the source [lanl.gov])
Apologies for being totally unimpressed, based on the provided info I don't have reasons to be otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @10:47AM
In other words,
Or, not.
Very informative article, for those in need of High-tech Armour, like criminals and racist cops. STEM, again? Science, Thievery, Evasion, and Munitions.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:37PM
Well, it's phys.org...