Showing posts with label nano material. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nano material. Show all posts

2011-11-18

World's Lightest Material

BBC News - World's 'lightest material' unveiled by US engineers

A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material.
The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice - a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes.

The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has "extraordinarily high energy absorption" properties.

HRL Laboratories, LLC.

Using an innovative fabrication process developed at HRL, researchers created a “micro-lattice” structure of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of
100 nanometers, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.
Photo credit: Photo by Dan Little © HRL Laboratories, LLC.
This new material redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture. Using an innovative fabrication process developed by HRL senior scientist Dr. Alan Jacobsen, the team was able to make a material that consists of 99.99% open volume by designing the 0.01% solid at the nanometer, micron and millimeter scales. “The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometers, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair,” said lead author Dr. Tobias Schaedler.

In addition to its ultra-low density, the material’s cellular architecture gives rise to unprecedented mechanical behavior for a metal, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50% strain and extraordinarily high energy absorption. Developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the novel material could be used for battery electrodes, catalyst supports, and acoustic, vibration or shock energy damping.




Super-light lattice packs heavy-duty potential | Deep Tech - CNET News

"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometers, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said Tobias Schaedler, the HRL researcher who's lead author of the paper. Another HRL author, Bill Carter, likened the design to a small-scale version of the Eiffel Tower: strong, but mostly air.
This sequence of photos shows the nickel lattice being compressed for the first time, then rebounding. After a 50 percent compression, it rebounds to 98 percent its original height.
(Credit: HRL)






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2010-04-14

Bulletproof T-shirts

Discovery News

How to Make a Bulletproof T-shirt

THE GIST:
  • That T-shirt you're wearing could be more than just clothing.
  • Ordinary, cotton T-shirts could be used to create body armor.
  • The material could also be applied to produce lightweight, fuel efficient cars and aircraft.
T-shirts available at Wal-Mart could be converted into wearable armor, according to scientists from South Carolina, Switzerland and China.
The treated T-shirt would be not only bulletproof, but also resistant to ultraviolet light from the sun and life-threatening neutrons emitted by decaying radioactive materials.

Bulletproof T-shirts?


To turn cotton bulletproof, researchers from the University of South Carolina and their collaborators from China and Switzerland dipped sections of regular T-shirts (Fig 1a) in a special mix of nickel and borate. After allowing the cotton to absorb the mix for 2 hours (Fig 1b), the textile was dried quickly in an oven and cured at a high temperature for 3 hours. Once ready, the pieces of cotton were placed in a furnace and headed at 1160°C for 4 hours while continuously aerated with argon. Finally, the resulting fabric pieces (Fig 1c) were cooled and analyzed using electron microscopes and a barrage of strength tests.





Ordinary T-shirts could become body armor

A simple cotton T-shirt may one day be converted into tougher, more comfortable body armor for soldiers or police officers.

Researchers at the University of South Carolina, collaborating with others from China and Switzerland, drastically increased the toughness of a T-shirt by combining the carbon in the shirt’s cotton with boron – the third hardest material on earth. The result is a lightweight shirt reinforced with boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks.

Dr. Xiaodong Li, USC College of Engineering and Computing Distinguished Professor in Mechanical Engineering, co-authored the recent article on the research in the journal, Advanced Materials.


Clipped from: NanoCenter :: News

The Latest from the NanoCenter

Nanocomposite Body Armor from T-Shirts

Using cotton t-shirts as both a template and a carbon source Xiaodong ("Chris") Li and colleagues from Hangzhou/China and Zurich/Switzerland were able to make  large quantities of radially-aligned high-strength B4C nanowires.

Download the paper here:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123314249/HTMLSTART

See also:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/March/16031001.asp


Sources:
  1. How to Make a Bulletproof T-shirt : Discovery News
  2. NanoCenter :: News
  3. Bulletproof T-shirts? : Observations of a Nerd
  4. USC > CEC > Mechanical Engineering
  5. NanoCenter :: News
Related:
  1. Making 'armoured' T-shirts
  2. Boron carbide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  3. US scientists reveal bulletproof T-shirts
  4. Process That Converts Cotton to Boron Carbide Could Create Armored T-Shirts | Popular Science
  5. Ordinary T-shirts could become body armor
  6. B4C-Nanowires/Carbon-Microfiber Hybrid Structures and Composites from Cotton T-shirts. Xinyong Tao. 2010; Advanced Materials - Wiley InterScience
  7. How to Make a Bulletproof T-Shirt | Discoblog | Discover Magazine
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2010-02-03

Liquid Glass Spray Protects Any Surface

clipped from www.smartplanet.com

‘Liquid glass’ spray can protect any surface from water, dirt, bacteria, heat, UV


Engineers have developed a new, invisible, non-toxic spray dubbed “liquid glass” that can protect any surface from water, dirt, bacteria, heat and ultraviolet radiation.
The patent for the spray, which is harmless to the environment, is owned by German firm Nanopool. The company is in discussions with several manufacturers to use the spray in everything from cleaning products, high-speed trains, luxury hotels, designer clothing and restaurants.
clipped from www.nanopool.biz
nanopool® GmbH, located in Schwalbach (Germany),
is an innovative family business. Since 2001, it belongs to the businesses which deal with nanotechnology in the surface refinement field.
blog it

clipped from www.nanopool.eu

Liquid Glass is probably the world’s most versatile new technology ?


“SiO2- ultra thin layering” is the technical term for Liquid Glass. Apart from a select group of professionals, few people in the UK know about this stunning technology. If you walk around Ataturk’s Mausoleum in Ankara you are walking on it; if you visit certain hospitals in the UK you are touching it. If you see an unusually clean train you are probably looking at it, and if you wonder how your white settee looks so clean, you may be sitting on it. All of these surfaces have been coated with invisible glass.
The fissure was induced in order present an image which shows the characteristics of the coating.
The image shows the SiO2 coating on a filament of a microfibre.
clipped from www.popsci.com
Spray-On Liquid Glass In the future, adding a protective coat of silicon dioxide "liquid glass" to just about anything could be as simple as merely spraying it on.
Mschel
clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk
Housework made easy: The spray-on glass would eliminate the need for scrubbing
Housework made easy: The spray-on glass would eliminate the need for scrubbing
blog it
Sources:
  1. ‘Liquid glass’ spray can protect any surface from water, dirt, bacteria, heat, UV 
  2. NANOPOOL
  3. Spray-On 'Liquid Glass' Protects Surfaces From Just About Anything
  4.  Revealed: The spray-on liquid glass that could protect us from dirt and bacteria | Mail Online
Related: 
  1. Liquid glass: the spray-on scientific revelation - Telegraph  
  2. Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything
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2009-06-13

Buckymesh a Nano Material with Amzing Properties

NanoDiamond is Now Buckymesh

NanoDiamond is a theoretical material with such an amazing strength-to-weight ratio that it challenges our intuitions about what is physically possible. Michael Richards, the creator of the nanoDiamond idea, recently renamed the material buckymesh, which is definitely an improvement. The term “nanodiamond” is commonly used to refer to small diamonds.

clipped from www.buckymesh.com

Buckymesh

clipped from www.buckymesh.com

The Design

Join four short thin nanotubes together, using six saddles, into the shape of a caltrop (or a tetrahedron):

Let's call this a nanojack.
Join two nanojacks together - seen from the side it looks like a strange, two-legged dog; seen from the top it looks like a six-pointed star:

Join ten nanojacks together into (very) roughly the shape of a sphere:

Join a whole bunch of nanojacks together (26 in fact) and you can see the structure is the same as that of

blog it


clipped from www.buckymesh.com

Uses

Where could we use this material? In theory, assuming that it has a reasonable absolute strength, just about anywhere from skyscrapers and houses to toys and tools. And it could be very inexpensive to make, not counting design and other costs. (See also Configurations.)

clipped from www.buckymesh.com
Configurations

One might think this material would be hard, like steel, and therefore of limited use. However, imagine the effect of varying configurations of the material at one or more of the many scales along which it is built. Consider just a few of the millions of possible arrangements:

For example, compare the sphere with short and medium nanotubes:

It could even be made into approximately fractal dimensional structures, such as 'gaskets' or 'sponges'. (It is nearly a fractal dimensional structure itself.)




Sources:
  1. Accelerating Future » NanoDiamond is Now Buckymesh
  2. Buckymesh
Related:
  1. nanoDiamond
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