IHADAV8.com - Turbo Buick Tech, and Nonsense
General => IHADAV8 Playground => Topic started by: daveismissing on February 22 2016, 10:38:00 AM
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Researchers affiliated with Boeing have produced what they claim to be the lightest metal ever made. It’s called “microlattice,” and the reason it’s so light is because it’s 99.99% air.
Sophia Yang, research scientist in architected materials at HRL Laboratories, a joint venture that Boeing is involved in with General Motors, calls it ”the world’s lightest material.” It’s an open-cellular polymer structure, made of interconnected hollow tubes, in three dimensions.
Yang compares its structure to bone, with a rigid skin and mostly hollow honeycomb interior. Bones are rigid and strong, as we know, but they also have a degree of flexibility due to the presence of collagen, and are relatively light. In the case of microlattice, the tubes that create the lattice structure are so thin, they look like tiny wires, with a wall thickness of 100 nm, which is 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. In HRL’s promotional image, a small block of the material is shown balanced atop a dandelion.
The material, besides being extremely light, has some remarkable mechanical characteristic s. Among these are its ability to completely recover from compression exceeding 50% strain. It also offers extraordinaril y high energy absorption.
(http://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/boeing-mircolattice-lightweight-material-designboom-01-818x627.jpg)
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I can see the energy absorption as it is mostly air and a fluid like that can be heated and cooled readily.
Really a cool idea and design. I wonder how hard it is to manufacture.
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Looks a lot like what is inside a Boeing rotor blade
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Knocked a few apart have ya?
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Knocked a few apart have ya?
Bullet holes and fragmentation from other explosives can do some damage. They are amazingly tuff and repairable
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Do they get re-balanced like props?
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Do they get re-balanced like props?
Depends on the amount of repair that was done for a static balance but we will always do a dynamic balance after a repair. I'm only talking chinooks, don't know about other airframes