How much does it cost to produce?
Can we build rocket that will go to Mars out of it?
New lightweight material is stronger than steel
81–90 of 162 posts
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#82Have they tested this for super conductivity?
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#83Just a heads up - strength is not a single metric. There is tensile (pulling), compression, and shear (sliding) strength. There's also Young's modulus (how much something stretches), fatigue limits (steel can work perpetually with deformations under a certain threshold). There's also specific strength (strength per kg) vs strength per volume and strength per dollar. Steel also comes in lots of different flavors, with…
I’ve often heard that spider silk is stronger per kg (or is it per m^3?) than steel. Are they talking about pulling, compressing, sliding, or all of the above?
Pulling (tensile), which is also the direction steel is unusually strong in (from a materials perspective).
Compression wise it’s close to a wet noodle the way it’s manufacturable (though that has more to do with cost/practical production/gathering methods - if we could get a solid chunk of it I imagine it would be pretty strong in compression).
Sliding, it’s a fiber, so very weak in that sense (barring the same scenario above). It actively flexes, so isn’t strong’
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#84Just a heads up - strength is not a single metric. There is tensile (pulling), compression, and shear (sliding) strength. There's also Young's modulus (how much something stretches), fatigue limits (steel can work perpetually with deformations under a certain threshold). There's also specific strength (strength per kg) vs strength per volume and strength per dollar. Steel also comes in lots of different flavors, with…
> The researchers found that the new material’s elastic modulus — a measure of how much force it takes to deform a material — is between four and six times greater than that of bulletproof glass. They also found that its yield strength, or how much force it takes to break the material, is twice that of steel, even though the material has only about one-sixth the density of steel.
The problem with this is that steel is a large class of alloys, with a wide variety of properties depending on the chemical and physical makeup of an alloy. Even "types of steel" that people are familiar with - e.g. stainless steel - are not specific alloys but themselves classes of alloys. I'm not a metallurgist but I assume there are dozens if not hundreds of alloys qualifying as steel.
So when someone writes an article saying "it's stronger than steel!" that's exciting, but it's not enough information. In this case we know it's stronger by yield strength. We can say the new material's yield strength is twice that of the weakest known steel alloy, but no more than that.
A quick look around found this:
https://amesweb.info/Materials/Steel-Tensile-Yield-Strength-...
You can see here, there is a wide gulf between the weakest and strongest alloys just in this chart, which only has five alloys and a handful of different treatments. Yield strength is anywhere from 210MPa to over 1600MPa, an 8x difference.
This page has some charts for the new material:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mechanical-properties-of...
Subchart (g) in the image shows a plot of yield strength against elastic modulus, and it looks like the plot tops out around 1.4 GPa, meaning the strongest tested configuration by yield strength is weaker than that of tempered 4140 and 4340 steels, while nearly 7x stronger than hot-rolled 1020 steel. I don't know if "2D yield strength" is different than what is shown in the amesweb.info table, though.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is quite certain that a 2-dimensional polymer cannot be recycled like metal, glass or a thermoplastic material, i.e. by remelting or by plastic deformation at high temperatures, because a 2-dimensional polymer cannot be deformed without breaking covalent bonds and it cannot flow in a liquid state. So this new material might behave like the existing cured polymeric resins, e.g. epoxy resins, which form a 3-dimensio…
Your answer illustrates why, after all these years, HN is still one of the best places to lurk. As someone who forgot most of what he learned in HS chemistry, and didn’t take any collegiate courses, what material would you recommend to learn about this stuff?
I am sorry but I cannot give a good recommendation as some years have passed since I have last searched for chemistry books in this domain.
If you go to Amazon and you search, e.g., for "Polymer Chemistry" and for "Materials Chemistry", you will find much more than 100 books. However I do not know which are the best among the recent books.
A less risky way than ordering such a book, and finding after paying for it that it is a dud, would be to go to an online site like Library Genesis, search there for such books (there are plenty), browse through them and maybe, if you find what you need, choose one or more to buy in printed form.
Alternatively, you can read the Amazon reviews for such books, to determine which would be worthy. The Amazon reviews for such specialized items as a science book are usually more trustworthy than for items of general interest.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#86Maybe a stupid thought, but could a carbon-based building material be the best possible news for carbon sequestration? I mean, we humans need a lot of buildings.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#87Just a heads up - strength is not a single metric. There is tensile (pulling), compression, and shear (sliding) strength. There's also Young's modulus (how much something stretches), fatigue limits (steel can work perpetually with deformations under a certain threshold). There's also specific strength (strength per kg) vs strength per volume and strength per dollar. Steel also comes in lots of different flavors, with…
There are also other metrics that are often confused with strength but have distinct definitions such as toughness, hardness, and wear resistance.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#88And we thought spaceships would be built out of transparent aluminum ;-)
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#89This material should produce some interesting surfboard designs
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#90What happens when it catches fire?