Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Trees have to be big, strong, lightweight, and bendable. Homogeneous materials won't work for that application. Why wouldn't titanium work for that application? (Assume that somehow the plant can move nutrients and fluids around some other way.) Or even steel, as long as it's not solid? Obviously, nature can't produce hollow steel tubes, but lots of metals satisfy your requirement list here.
In any stellar system like ours, where oxygen is the most abundant element, except for the hydrogen and helium that are contained mostly in the star and in the big planets, almost all metals are completely oxidized (with the exception of the siderophile elements submerged into the cores of the planets, because of their great density) and the amount of metallic substances with a natural origin that can be found in the…
A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
91–100 of 135 posts
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably not great for the environment though, with plastic microfibers washing into our oceans and DWR coatings being toxic and leaching into waterways. Compared to, say, what they climbed Everest with originally, yeah, our gear today is lighter, cheaper, more effective, but also more environmentally impactful and much less degradable. It's all just byproducts of the oil industry. We're a lot more comfortable now, b…
I agree with the thrust of your argument, but I just want to point out that wool is not environmentally neutral. Sheep are incredibly destructive and have historical caused a lot of degradation of habitats. https://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/30/sheepwrecked/
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wood pulp and cotton fiber aren’t that different, are they?
They are? Generally fiber length determines how tough a given composite will be. There's a reason why clothes are made out of cotton fiber not wood.
Clothes made of ‘bamboo fiber’ are made of rayon, for example.
Cotton is also normally mercerized [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercerisation], or treated like Denim, etc.
It’s all made of cellulose at the end of the day.
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#94A swing and a miss. The future of materials is going back to plant fiber; wood, hemp, etc. There will be plenty of fancy composite materials for specialty applications; but our world has been made out of plastic for generations now and updated, improved plant fiber materials will replace it as the affordable, more sustainable, and equally functional alternative.
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Can you name a few example current alternatives and upcoming contenders? Are we talking far-tech where plants and other biome actors are engineered to produce materials in a particular shape and manner?
Bamboo is one material that has seen some traction in replacing plastic, especially in kid food items etc. however they do break easier. Hemp is also finally starting to have a real comeback but still has a lot of roadblocks ahead because of almost a decade of “bad press”.
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but plants don't normally pull carbon out of the ground; they get it from the air.
No reason they couldn’t, if it was advantageous for them though.
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#97One of my biggest everyday QoL upgrade is men's casual pants finally getting elastane. E: not just elastane but performance fabrics from athleisure in general, good moisture/odour/temperature control, easy to maintain etc. Some people like break in into their cotton/denim classics, but performance fabrics tend to not need break in in at all.
I'm glad there's more choice but I wish my favorite Levi's still had a 100% cotton option. After years of easy jean shopping I now have to find another brand.
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#98Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
In any stellar system like ours, where oxygen is the most abundant element, except for the hydrogen and helium that are contained mostly in the star and in the big planets, almost all metals are completely oxidized (with the exception of the siderophile elements submerged into the cores of the planets, because of their great density) and the amount of metallic substances with a natural origin that can be found in the…
The only possible way this comment could be more satisfying to read would be if it ended with "Until now." before the camera pans to a strange planet and the movie begins
The pre-solar grains are microscopic crystals, i.e. particles of dust, which have come to the Solar System as already solid grains of dust, from other stellar systems, typically having been propelled by stellar explosions, e.g. those of supernovae.
Such pre-solar grains have been incorporated in the many small bodies that have been condensed from gases along with the bigger asteroids and planets at the formation of the Solar System.
Some of those small bodies have fallen on Earth as meteorites (the so-called "chondrites"). When such meteorites have been analyzed carefully, pre-solar grains have been recovered. They can usually be easily distinguished from the local objects, by having very different isotopic compositions.
Among the pre-solar grains, there are many that have come from stellar systems of the second kind, with more carbon than oxygen. Such grains, instead of being silicates, i.e. the most frequent minerals in the stellar systems of the Solar type, have chemical compositions that are unusual for the minerals of the planets of the Solar System, like diamond, graphite, silicon carbide or nitride, titanium carbide or nitride, metal grains of either platinum-group metals or iron-group metals, other carbides, nitrides, sulfides, silicides or titanides.
For now, this is the only direct evidence of the second class of stellar systems, beyond the spectroscopic observations of various stars, which provide estimations for the relative abundance of carbon and oxygen in those stellar systems.
While we have some idea about what kind of minerals might be the most abundant in such stellar systems at the time of their initial condensation from gases, I am not aware of any attempt to simulate the possible internal structure for big planets in such stellar systems, in order to determine whether in such planets there could exist some analogs of the volcanism and hydrothermal vents that can provide the energy flux necessary for the appearance of life in the planets of the terrestrial type.
Re: A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest heavily into saving 100kg on the frame and then adding a 500kg battery. The i3 had a small, lighter battery and an extender.
If your frame is 100kg lighter doesn’t that mean you can get even better mileage out of your battery? Or, for the same weight, fit even more battery?
The rolling resistance coefficent of a car tire is about 0.01 and the force grows linearly with mass. Drag is v^2 and the coefficients are more like 0.2 - 0.3 of the frontal area on most EVs.
Weight savings don't offer that much range savings so there isn't much incentive to pull weight out of a design, especially when carbon fibre tub construction is so much more expensive.
BMW made a bet batteries would remain very scarce and expensive, a bet they lost pretty throughly.