Today in material science news we have a report from [German Science Guy] about a new supermaterial which is as strong as steel and as light as Styrofoam!
A supermaterial is a type of material that possesses remarkable physical properties, often surpassing traditional materials in strength, conductivity, or other characteristics. Graphene, for example, is considered a supermaterial because it is extremely strong, lightweight, and has excellent electrical conductivity.
This new supermaterial is a carbon nanolattice which has been developed by researchers from Canada and South Korea, and it has remarkably high strength and remarkably low weight. Indeed this new material achieved the compressive strength of carbon steels (180-360 MPa) with the density of Styrofoam (125-215 kg m-3).
One very important implication of the existence of such material is that it might lead to a reduction in transport costs if the material can be used to build vehicles such as airplanes and automobiles. For airplanes we could save up to 10 gallons per pound (80 liters per kilogram) per year, where an airplane like the Airbus A380-800 weighs in at more than one million pounds.
To engineer the new material the researchers employed two methods: the Finite Element Method (FEM) and Bayesian optimization. Technically these optimized lattices are manufactured using two-photon polymerization (2PP) nanoscale additive manufacturing with pyrolysis to produce carbon nanolattices with an average strut diameter of 300 and 600 nm.
If you have an interest in material science, you might also like to read about categorizing steel or the science of coating steel.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for letting us know about this one on the tips line.
I’m wondering how risky it could be that the material becomes semi-saturated with water/oil/debris if the skin fails leading to degradation of the performance or even a sudden structural failure.. it might be lighter and stronger in a lab setting but how about the nano-fracturing of the lattice over temperature cycles and other stressors.
If only we could encase it in some material other that was temperature-insulating and water resistant, yet as light as styrofoam… Like Styrofoam
Kidding aside, the real question is whether you get cancer from inhaling particles of this this stuff. Asbestos was a super material once upon a time.
If it’s making pyrolytic graphite, the fragments are likely a similar inhalation hazard to carbon fiber. Maybe not as toxic as asbestos — though, not sure if we have long-looking studies on that workplace hazard yet..?
That’s a point people forget. Nano materials may present that kind of dangers causing damage at a cellular level. Some unknown nasty extra proprieties, like micro plastics that accumulate toxic metals, are also possible.
Indeed. DNA methylation alters gene expression. Graphene also has a configuration not dissimilar to purine and pyrimidine bases that make up DNA. Intercalation of graphene fragments would be a potent mutagen as there several other mutagens that work by this mechanism
Now we need the bio-engineers to design some sponges or coral that will build the stuff.
Followed by the inevitable accidental release into the wild
Oh look, we invented coral reefs!
Graphene, known since 1859 is a “supermaterial” only in area of uselessness. There are no any actual superstrong ropes or untearing films promised a lot since the start of graphene hype. No promised graphene room temperature semiconductors of graphene teraHertz transistors. You will not be able to find around anything made from graphene with properties that could be named “super”, except may be, say, that “super odor absorber” for fridge with a text on the pack about “nanotubes”. But, honestly, I doubt it actually have any. Graphene is interesting in a lab without a doubt, but completely useless.
I’m afraid that this material have same fate. Looks like guys who made it, failed to make a piece of decent size to demostrate material super properties in real world, so they fall back to nanoscale samples.
You could have a lot of wonderful things at nanoscale, up to vacuum that is more vacuum than vacuum (in Casimir cavity), but they just can’t be scaled, or lose their wonderful properties when you try to make something that people could actually use.
Graphene sheets are use in many high end smartphones as part of their thermal design
Thirty years ago you could say the same thing about carbon fiber composites but by today they’re borderline common in practical use, if still somewhat premium.
More like 60 years. Carbon composites started appearing in Aviation applications in the mid60s riding advances made in the late 50s and early 60s. Improvements in material strength and production processes have both reduced the price and expanded the applicability every decade since.
Carbon is just a fancy name for something made from coal.. 🙄
And it can’t be properly repaired or recycled, even.
Even alumin(i)um is better here.
Calfee is excellent at repairing carbon-fiber frames.
https://calfeedesign.com/carbon-repair/
They can make it stronger than the original, and you can’t tell it was ever broken. However, short of certain types of abuse, a carbon-fiber frame will last indefinitely, unlike aluminum which does fatigue and break, although not as much as steel does. Any performance-oriented cyclist who has ridden a steel bike a lot has broken steel frames. I broke one myself, and got a new tube put in it, and broke it again, all in under 20,000 miles. I said I’m done with steel, and got a carbon-fiber bike. It has 63,000 miles on it now, and it’s still fine. I know a racer who has over 200,000 miles on a carbon frame.
Last forever as long as you don’t leave it in the sunshine…
Wow, a material that never fatigues or has failures…”Garth Wilson” must be another anagram for “Elon Musk”
@nospam, appropriate environmental protection is normal for all of the listed materials, you’re not going to leave a steel bike outside in most places in the world without it disintegrating.
nospam, I should have added that the steel I broke didn’t even have any rust in it. Inside the tubes it was all dark gray, without a speck of orange or brown. I had been careful to keep water and condensation out of it. It just fatigues, unlike the carbon fiber. Carbon fiber’s epoxy binder won’t be affected by normal sunshine though. If you leave it inside a black car on a hot day in Phoenix in the summer, it might soften and deform; but if you put it back in the right shape and let it cool, it will be fine. Someone took a bunch of frames of different materials around 20 years ago and put them in a jig and used pneumatic pistons to push the bottom bracket back and forth 200,000 cycles, to simulate out-of-the-saddle climbing a steep hill a mile a day for a year. There was overlap between materials durability, but generally the steel broke first, with none of the steel frames making it to the halfway point where the force was increased for the surviving frames, followed by titanium, and at least one of the aluminum frames made it all the way to the end without breaking, and none of the carbon broke. An internal aluminum lug in one of the carbon frames did break; but nobody makes frames that way anymore. Further, the metals technology was pretty mature already at the time, whereas carbon has continued to improve since then. Carbon fiber is not suitable for every part of the bike; but it’s definitely the best of the common ones for frames.
Twin layers of graphene can stop a bullet. They are creating body armour as we speak.
I unfortunately have to completely disagree. Graphene Batteries for Solar have been used for years, 500x better than lithium , graphene has been used in glass fibre making GFRP structural strength rebar and mech with properties 5 times stronger than steel in tensile, compression and shear… I could go on. This is an incredible product but the work of engineering is the one that has been slow to adapt to new way of calculating.
Old man shouts at mixed units:
“save up to 10 gallons per pound (80 liters per kilogram) per year, where a typical airplane weighs in at more than one million pounds.”
To engineer the new material the researchers
Yah… But it is a nice nod to readers who are more comfortable with liters or gallons. Don’t look at my CAD models, feet and millimeters co-exist in harmony
And then of course there’s the fact that a liter may be the same as a litre, but a gallon is not a gallon, and my CAD program refuses to work in football fields, washing machines and olympic-sized-swimming pools.
Same here… 2’ tall and 2500mm wide.
You must have a lot of trouble getting clothes that fit.
Why bother to insist on getting the facts right, when you can get picky about units?
” a typical airplane weighs in at more than one million pounds.”
Very few airplanes are that heavy. The only one currently flying (the A380) only gets over a million pounds when fully loaded with cargo and fuel.
Sorry about that I wasn’t careful with my language. I was referring to the Airbus A380-800 as mentioned in the video: https://youtu.be/qCf65Z2pe2Q?t=22
implies you need very active, very skinny people for the mile-high club :o)
An Airbus is European (and made by engineers) so you should use proper units.
Pound.. pfff
A writer writes to the audience and uses language they will understand. You’re suggesting that when we discuss Chinese items, the article should use Chinese writing.
This only works for compression loads; for tensile strength, only the bulk material and cross section are relevant, as far as I know. Maybe it’s possible to combine this with a material that is very good in tension and very bad at compression, like long-chain polymers, to create an equivalent of pre-stressed concrete, that is strong in both compression and tension.
I would be worried about fatigue performance.
look into foam core composite construction, where the low compressive and tensile streangth is not a detriment, as the ability to provide a bridge between the very high strength but thin walls, prevents buckling…..an even lighter corewith high compresive strength will of course be better, but who is kidding who, it would take forever to print a 4×8 sheet and it would cost a c4azy amount of money, so its not going to happen outside of mega budget space related stuff
If anyone looks closely at the pic at the top of this article (term used very loosely) at the bottom of the photo it shows the magnification 9.81k
… Which depends on screen rendering and a host of other factors. Maybe better to look at the actual and obvious 2-micron scale bar.
So what material is it?
I’m not going to click though 9 minutes of video for some dude to explain that airplanes are heavy, and the first pictures suggest it has something to do with a (3D printed?) matrix, and it’s not the material properties. Without mentioning such basics information in the text, it’s just clickbait to me. I understand Hackaday not liking too many negatively tainted comments, but this also depends on the quality of the written articles. Without mentioning the material in the text, you also can’t find posts though searches.
/\ This /\
Exactly this! I watched the whole video and waited for the intro to finish. The entire video was just an intro. The guy cannot even pronounce the word “finite”.
The material is a carbon nanolattice. The paper is here: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202410651 The notes on the YouTube video are also quite extensive but some of them are in German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCf65Z2pe2Q
I have updated the article to say that the material is a carbon nanolattice.
“graphene teraHertz transistors”
Yep…..still waiting on them :(
Me not, but nanotubes would be hot, err, cool!
Is this not just another silicon aerogel? I don’t mean in terms of material or synthesis method, but we don’t really have the technology to print out arbitrary configurations of arbitrary materials yet, so unless these cavities are self-assembling, I cannot imagine that it will be possible to make this structure in bulk. They will just be another than a wondermaterial with few to no applications due to cost.
We actually have a lot of those already.
I have silicon aerogel on my walls and floor and it’s a perfect insulator. They are enclosed in mylar and vacuum, so it’s technically a vacuum insulation with aerogel structure, with a R of only 0.0005 W/°K/m² and it’s not that expensive. It’s only 2cm thick so I’m not loosing precious room’s area here.
Ohh, very cool. You sent me off on a google quest. I reckon my parents’ home could do with some of that.
losing
“where a typical airplane weighs in at more than one million pounds” made me laugh.
Even Airbus a380 isn’t close to that number at 610 thousand pounds…heck, even AN225 is way under 1milion with 628k.
I bet rest of that writeup is just as accurate.
Sorry about that I wasn’t careful with my language. I was referring to the Airbus A380-800 as mentioned in the video: https://youtu.be/qCf65Z2pe2Q?t=22
Ok, bit this not a material, that is a structure
Right. The material is carbon. The structure is a nanolattice. Carbon isn’t new! :)
I could see this being useful in things like the “honey comb” sandwiches used in the aerospace industry for wing construction, or maybe as an augmentation to Whipple Shields in spacecraft. Thinking along those lines I wonder how it would function as a body armor component. Maybe sandwiched between composite armor plates?
Could this be the material needed to make the fabled “vacuum balloons”? I think Neal Stephenson used them in Diamond Age to support super tall sky scrapers.
On an entirely unrelated track, it puts me in mind of the “foamed” stainless steel used in brewing to carbonate beer. Something like this would make for much smaller bubbles and faster carbonation. Though they can do it in-line now as its transferred from vat to bright tank so maybe its too expensive for that.
Makes me wonder what this could do for filtration technology as well. If they can print in this particular structure then maybe they can make custom filter shapes for particular chemicals or particulates. Its too big for desalination membranes which are 0.1 to 1 nm, but might have other uses.
That reminds me, when is Ford going to start using that “nano-steel” that they were bragging about back in 2008?
…I think they have been and gone.
This is a truss based lightweighting (like aerogels); unfortunately it is difficult to scale this up for larger scales (amount) and rapid manufacturing. alternative additive layer manufacturing is quite viable for hirearchical (cellular) structured materials. This can be seen in the (design) work of Prof Mike Ashby, (Cambridge UK) and, also Roderic Lakes (Wisconsin) in ultra lightweighting (Lakes gives a homage to the work of Eiffel). The book by Ashby & Gibson gives some examples of how cellular structured materials may be designed.
However the manufacture is the problem. Please see, for an example of a 2nd order structure manufacturing , in the comments in https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/dmex-to-develop-advanced-defence-materials/
True that they are not great for tension but for energy absorption (directly or viscous dissipation) and stiffness and strength there are many design opportunites. I should say that I do not know if layers of graphite can be well bonded but for titanium sheet manufacturing is clear (and most likely for most metals).
But, to re-iterate there needs to be interest in manufacturing at a useful scale (eg for armout or submarines….)
Any mention of shear or tensile strength? Styrofoam itself is pretty good at compressive..
The paper covers compression and shear, no mention of tensile: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202410651
No mention of tensile strength, so probably very, very low. Looking at the structure, with a little compression, the lattice translates shear to compression. It can’t translate tensile forces to anything.
So they’re claiming to have invented carbon?
I was hoping to see some closeups of the rod.