Researchers from MIT have created a new material that is actually stronger than graphene – making it 10 times stronger than steel, with only five percent of its density. The research has many applications, according to experts, including ones in the fields of architecture, construction, and even filtration.
For years, researchers have known that carbon, when arranged in a certain way, can be very strong. Case in point: graphene.
Graphene, which was heretofore, the strongest material known to man, is made from an extremely thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged in two dimensions. But there’s one drawback: while notable for its thinness and unique electrical properties, it’s very difficult to create useful, three-dimensional materials out of graphene.
Now, a team of MIT researchers discovered that taking small flakes of graphene and fusing them following a mesh-like structure not only retains the material’s strength, but the graphene also remains porous. Based on experiments conducted on 3D printed models, researchers have determined that this new material, with its distinct geometry, is actually stronger than graphene – making it 10 times stronger than steel, with only five percent of its density.
can it really be classed as a new material? if you arranged flakes of steel into a structure that made it stronger than a piece of steel, would it not still be called steel??
i'm not trying to downplay the discovery, but i think its misleading to call it a new material, it isn't.
correct, but coal, diamonds, iron, and steel are considered different because of the structure of the atoms, what the MiT team has done is to take graphene and structure that material in a certain way, think of it as origami, its still paper, but its shape alters its properties.
they do state that this same structure can be used with different materials,(not elements) that explicitly states that this is not a material itself, but a structure using a material.
edit* sorry, they are considered different because of how the atoms are structured, they are still carbon atoms..
Coal is not just carbon, Graphine on the other hand is, and yes Graphene and Diamonds are only made of carbon but arranged in different way, however this is for the base structure of the element and in the video they did not present us with a different structures because how the fuck are we supposed to make the "walls" of the base structure thicker ... ?
I mean I don't know they will have to release more info but the examples in the video were not convincing.
A new arrangement of the atoms is a new material. The majority of molecules in your body are made of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, but they are all different. The structure is what matters.
This article seems a bit odd and amateurish. They're saying the graphene flake mesh was found to be 10 times stronger than steel in computational simulation but it says nothing about whether it was in practice. Also what I've read about graphene is that it's more than 200X stronger than steel in the one atom thick sheets but this is saying the 3d material is only 10X stronger than steel. In which case the title is inaccurate as hell. This isn't even close to the strongest material we can produce. Maybe in terms of 3d materials it might be up there. Also when they say steel, what type of steel do they mean? There are different types of steel with different levels of hardness and tensile strength. Knowing the point of reference they're using would be nice.
You are likely only going to be satisfied by reading whatever paper they have written. More mainstream news sources aren't going to get things right very much on a technical level.
I have written a lot of papers and made a lot of presentations that pulled from many different papers and primary sources. And news sites like this, and articles in general, are only really good for finding you the things of interest. If you want to know anything specific, don't waste your time with the nonsense that they are using the herd the masses to their site. Find the primary source, and read it for yourself. Understand what you can, find what you are interested in, get the answers you want straight from the source.
I know I just wish they'd site a source or something. Just don't feel like fishing around through the ACS or whatever database this experimental data was published in. Just seems really lazy on the part of the writer of this article. Lot of news sites I look at least have a link.
Yeah, the people writing these articles are trying to get views. That is all that matters. Spending a lot of time getting the facts straight, explaining things well, and all of that is pointless for them from a business perspective. They need more views, and the masses just don't care about things like that. Their time is better spent finding some other news that they can write an article about. They are trying to cast a wide net and get a lot of views, not actually educate the curious. That is why you have to really take things into your own hands if you want to actually learn anything about something like this.
I get you, I just like having more details. I work in scientific research for a living so to me this stuff just doesn't come across to me as anything other than a very broad/general description of what they're doing.
I can't find the original paper (though I didn't look too hard, and am not all that interested in physics and stuff, so I am not too familiar with the area), so I would not be surprised to find that the paper hasn't been published yet. It could be some months or years before we get an actual paper on it with all the details. I think they are currently just publishing their findings to get some hype.