I can't believe no one has mentioned this: The researchers claim this material is completely impervious to gasses. Does that mean we've finally got a way to store hydrogen without having it constantly leaking away?
New lightweight material is stronger than steel
111–120 of 162 posts
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 scen…
As I recall my material science, it's not so much that steel is weak in compression but, if you have a rod of steel (i.e. much longer than it is thick), if you compress it, it will buckle and shear. As you suggest--I'd have to look up the numbers--but a large cube of steel probably has similar strength with tensile and compressive loads. ADDED: In fact, if you deform a supported I-beam you get similar amounts of tens…
I read the grandparent the same way you did at first. GP is talking about spider silk in all three of those points.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#113Pressure vessels. Big ones.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#114I can't believe no one has mentioned this: The researchers claim this material is completely impervious to gasses . Does that mean we've finally got a way to store hydrogen without having it constantly leaking away?
And is that strength enough to put vacuum airships back on the menu?
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#115I hate title.
Do they mean run of the mill plastic?
What does stronger than steel mean? Tensile strength? Yield strength? Toughness?
And “stronger” than steel is not that impressive in of itself. Many materials are stringer than steel. Steel’s combination of properties makes it useful, not merely its tensile strength.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ar…
I think you're missing the novel polymer for the steel-forest. Its a 2d polymer (spans a plane instead of forming strings, which is new) that has material properties that make it comparable to materials that we think of as strong.
The part where it gets rigorously classified can come later. The people involved with this project were themselves probably not metallurgists.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Titanium even more so. For those, they are actively swapped around where cost vs weight trade offs happen. steel vs aluminum vs magnesium, vs titanium in engineering application, where for example engine blocks, airplane parts, car parts, battery components, etc. all have a long history of this. It’s a complicated process because the trade offs are not simple cost/weight/strength. Steel has an nearly infinite fatigue…
>Several major accidents (including the top of an airliner coming off and sucking a flight attendant out over the pacific on the way to Hawaii) It was actually an inter-island flight so lots of short flights (and therefore pressurization cycles relative to flight hours or miles). The amazing thing was that the plane was able to make an emergency landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
So this was in 1988?
I would have suspected this story was out of the early days of the big airliners.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#118I can't believe no one has mentioned this: The researchers claim this material is completely impervious to gasses . Does that mean we've finally got a way to store hydrogen without having it constantly leaking away?
And is that strength enough to put vacuum airships back on the menu?
I'm intrigued. What's a vacuum airship?
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#119I can't believe no one has mentioned this: The researchers claim this material is completely impervious to gasses . Does that mean we've finally got a way to store hydrogen without having it constantly leaking away?
It is impervious to gases in comparison with the 1-dimensional polymers, which have large inter-molecular spaces through which small molecules can pass.
There is no reason to believe that these 2-dimensional polymers are more impervious to gases than metals or glasses or covalent or ionic crystals, all of which have similar inter-atomic distances.
Re: New lightweight material is stronger than steel
#120Yay, Rearden Steel!