Posted 06.08.2011 at 10:04 am
10 Comments
Hard to Soft at the Push of a Button
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres
Materials scientists are constantly trying to tweak their products to be a little stronger, a little less brittle, a little more malleable--it’s the engineer’s job to imbue any material with the properties it needs to do its job. That often means striking a compromise between conflicting properties, but perhaps not for much longer. Researchers at the Technical University of Hamburg and the Helmholtz Center Geesthacht have engineered a new nanomaterial that changes from hard to soft with the flip of a switch.
The material is essentially an electrically tunable metal that can be hard and brittle or soft and malleable depending on the charge passing through it. To create the material, researchers placed precious metals like gold and platinum in an acidic bath, where corrosion cuts tiny porous channels or ducts through the metal. Those interior channels are then filled with a conductive liquid partner, like a diluted acid or saline solution.
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Science, Clay Dillow, materials science, metals, nanomaterials, nanometals, nanotechThat’s a enviable quality for a metal to have. It opens the door to a variety of applications, including self-healing materials that can respond to stress in certain areas by becoming softer or harder as the situation commands.
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pretty cool
cool invention but what can it be used for? and where a video of it occurring?
Maybe we won't have to wait for the SDF1 to drop out of the sky...
Hmm... combine this with the electronic muscles where they layer different metal sheets, and it doesn't sound like transformer esq machines are that far off... just need to get the all spark now. in one word, cool.
Perhaps malleable body Armor? Find yourself in a hostile situation and hit the "Tank Mode" button.
Sounds like this could become the Terminator.
good-bye viagra.
@Turbo Two Tone
Awesome, I lolled! Then I thought of "Cleric Mode" and "Ranged DPS Mode" buttons, and lolled some more.
They use a similar concept on viscosity for shock absorbers in trucks. Changing state on the fly can be used for numerous things. You can walk on water when it's frozen kinda thing. But you can't "pour" a bridge. So drive up to a chasm with 55 gallon drums and then fill a mold. Instant girder to instant bridge.
This reminds me of this great science fiction book that came out a year ago called 'Code Name: Atlas' that talked about similar metals in the book. Just goes to show how sci-fi and real science are keeping up with each other.