I’m sure this is real, but I see a headline like that and I think of schoolyard talk. Like, nuh uh, my armour has 100 trillion bonds, you can’t shoot me.
Why don’t they just use diamond, the hardest metal?
Hardness isn’t the best thing to have in armor. In fact, extreme hardness means extreme brittleness.
Tensile strength is more desirable in armor. That’s the sort of strength that a string or rope, or Kevlar will have.
Those can stretch a bit before breaking.
Kevlar will stretch a bit when catching a bullet, this does a few things, but importantly it slows the bullet before stopping it.
So this new material will likely show extreme tensile strength rather than hardness.
i could make stronger
Me when the only thing I eat all day is weed and cheese.
I did your mom stronger
I can’t wait to find out how toxic this is.
They will make it into a mandatory dress uniform for school children.
Good news, it’s completely non toxic.
Bad news, it costs 2 million dollars per square foot.
The pentagon will now take your whole paycheck.
Thank you for your support, patriot.
Good news, it costs 2 million dollars per square foot, so they won’t militarise the police further with it.
Well not immediately… Years from now when the military develops something even better then this will all become surplus and sold off to SWAT teams etc. for next to nothing.
The article says the process is scalable.
100 trillion barry bonds
At least it’s not 100 trillion James Bonds.
Not if Hank Scorpio has anything to say about it.
…and uses it to oppress and/or disenfranchise poor people
You mispronounced promote American interests.
This is still basic research, it’s not close to commercialization.
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Now this is a technology post!
I don’t know if I’d call materials science technology, exactly, but it’s certainly more on topic than “business but at a tech company” posts.
What would you say is technology? Materials science isn’t technology, but what about things made out of the materials created by materials science?
Yeah, everyone knows that technology only involves computers and they’re basically just made out of metal and not some fancy material.
Of course material science is technology lol
Wow what a stupid comment. Materials science is technology.
hello I would like to order a thousand full plate mails
Could this be used to make a space elevator?
I think I remember reading that a structure strong enough would have to be wider than the earth
The stronger the material the thinner it could be.
There are a lot of properties in the word ‘stronger’ though.
No.
What about a space escalator?
Escalator is smart, because if it breaks, you can still walk to space.
I heard it was for lifts only
It would probably be strong enough, but not viable to manufacture.
Extreme doubt on strong enough. The author of this article barely understands the words they are using. Cool it strain hardens, so do so many other materials. Cool it’s tough like many other materials. Wow it has more links than others. No actual numbers about toughness, yield, ultimate strength, cycle limits, etc. It’s great research, but it absolutely isn’t going to magically solve the space elevator issue.
Space elevator companies seem to think that materials exist that are strong enough, just that they are not long enough.
https://www.isec.org/space-elevator-tether-materials
Very much layman conjecture, but my assumption is that this material is stronger than carbon nanotubes and graphene.
Any company will market that its ideas are possible. The article you linked is promising, but take it with a huge grain of salt. They are moving the goalposts the whole article. Flat graphene is a great material for space elevators, but it can’t currently be created without defects. Polycrystaline means the graphene created includes defects sort of. It means the graphene they created that is km’s long has shitloads of places where cycle loading will cause it to fail way under (like 10%) of its expected load carrying capacity.
Edit: I want this technology to exist. My MS in mechanical engineering focused in materials science tells me we are quite far from it happening.
Goes on to form company called General Products, builds spacecraft hulls. 😉
Please, could we move to Known Space?
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Currently, garbage. They used it to reinforce a polymer to go from a strength of 50 MPa to 70 MPa. Kevlar is 10x stronger, commercially scaled, and cheap
Surely I can’t be the only one who thought this were interleaved DNA chains
Anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that DNA is not a particularly effective armor.
molecular chainmail
