Lightest Material Ever Created?
news.nationalgeographic.com
National Geographic comes through with better (read: layman) descriptions of the groundbreaking material that I posted about previously.
Jet black and highly porous, a piece of Aerographite almost completely absorbs the beam from a green laser in a 2012 picture.
The new champion in the “lightest in the world” category, the carbon-based material is the recent creation of a team of scientists from Germany’s University of Kiel and Hamburg University of Technology.
“Even very thin specimens of Aerographite are fully opaque for the eye,” said Hamburg’s Matthias Mecklenburg.
Unlike a sponge, which would “leak” or “glow” any light aimed at it, Aerographite is “not a bit transparent,” he said.
But, he added, our hands would hardly register its “fluffy,” spongelike surface, because the innovative material is practically weightless.
Electrically conductive and lighter than the previous titleholder—a nickel-based material introduced earlier this year—Aerographite has promising applications in the engineering of batteries and water-purification systems, as well as in biotechnology.
New lighter-than-air material may be Holy Grail for batteries
thestar.comFrom The Toronto Star:
German scientists have almost accidently created the world’s lightest material.
A cubic centimetre of aerographite weighs just two ten-thousandths of a gram, six times lighter than air and 75 times lighter than Styrofoam.
“You can hold it,” Dr. Rainer Adelung told the Star. “Although it has almost no gravity.”
Lightest material in the world
The lightest material in the world, Aerographite, has been developed by scientists from Kiel University and Hamburg University of Technology. The material is a complex arrangement of hollow carbon tubes, which are grown at nano and micro scales and are made of 99.99% air - hence the term ‘Aerographite’. It has an extremely low density but is stronger than steel and most other materials.
The use of this new material spans to absolutely everything - it could replace bridge pylons, making them stronger, lighter and smaller. It is also ductile, widely increasing it’s uses in the world, as well as weighing in at a mere 0.2 milligrams per cubic centimetre - while still being able to support matter over 40,000 times it’s own weight! It can be compressed over 1000 times and it’ll still spring right back to it’s original size.
The uses with this are endless - we’ll be hearing a lot more of this in the future.
