World’s Lightest Metal Is 1/100th The Weight Of Styrofoam

Sunday, November 20, 2011 - 20:30 in Physics & Chemistry

Researchers have developed what they are billing as the world’s lightest material . With a density of 0.9 mg/cc, it is about one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam™. The new material redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture, they say - consists of 99.99 percent air by designing the 0.01 percent solid at the nanometer, micron and millimeter scales.  The material’s architecture allows unprecedented mechanical behavior for a metal, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50 percent strain and extraordinarily high energy absorption. read more

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