Futurist Foresight

Using spider silk as a kevlar replacement has been discussed for years, but may finally be practically applicable.

laboratoryequipment:

Silk is Better than Kevlar

At seven times the tough­ness of Kevlar, a silk pro­duced by the Caerostris dar­wini spider of Mada­gascar is more robust than any other material — synthetic or nat­ural. Most spider silks are about two times tougher than Kevlar, and have long been con­sid­ered an intriguing alter­na­tive for bul­let­proof vests and other pro­tec­tive gear. There’s only one problem: pro­ducing spider silk on demand is a tricky task.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/silk-better-kevlar

An interesting material. Looks like wood but flows like material.

wildcat2030:

WoodSkin is a fascinating new composite material created by the Milan design studio Mamma Fotogramma that looks like lovely patterned wood, but moves with the flexibility of a sheet blowing in the breeze. Its plastic nature allows it to function as a stylish, organic-looking skin for projects that might otherwise be built with standard, flat materials.

The creation started as an entry to the open-source design competition Autoprogettazione 2.0 in 2012, and came to fruition in Montreal later that year as Mamma Fotogramma’s Giulio Masotti and Gianluca Lo Presti used it to design part of the lobby interior of Allez Up, an indoor rock climbing gym near the border of the Lachine Canal. For two months the team lived and worked in Montreal next to the sugar silos where the gym was to be installed and invented the entire process to make WoodSkin. Since the undertaking of combining a rigid substance like wood with a malleable textile was completely new to them, they even created three-meter long wheeled presses to experiment with hybrid materials that would be flexible yet sturdy. (via Design Firm Creates a Composite Wooden Material That Flexes Like Skin | Wired Design | Wired.com)

Materials: How would double strength change an industry?

laboratoryequipment:

Chemical Process Makes Double-Strength Glass

Glass is strong enough for so much: windshields, buildings and many other things that need to handle high stress without breaking. But scientists who look at the structure of glass strictly by the numbers believe some of the latest methods from the microelectronics and nanotechnology industry could produce glass that’s about twice as strong as the best available today.

Rice Univ. chemist Peter Wolynes is one of them. Wolynes and Rice graduate student Apiwat Wisitsorasak determined in a new study that a process called chemical vapor deposition, which is used industrially to make thin films, could yield a glass that withstands tremendous stress without breaking.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/09/chemical-process-makes-double-strength-glass

Aerogels: An amazing substance.

carlburton:

Aerogel

“Aerogel is a synthetic porous material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. The result is a solid with extremely low density^[1] and thermal conductivity. It is nicknamed frozen smoke,^[2] solid smoke, solid air or blue smoke owing to its translucent nature and the way lightscatters in the material”

(via astrotastic)

Materials: New aerogels are even stronger than before.

laboratoryequipment:

Space-Age Material Can Insulate Homes, Clothes

A major improvement in the world’s lightest solid material and best solid insulating material may put more of this space-age wonder into insulated clothing, refrigerators with thinner walls that hold more food, building insulation and other products. The report, on development of a new flexible “aerogel” ― stuff so light it has been called “solid smoke” ― was part of the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

Mary Ann Meador, explains that traditional aerogels developed decades ago and made from silica, found in beach sand, are brittle, and break and crumble easily. Scientists have improved the strength of aerogels over the years, and Meador described one of these muscled-up materials developed with colleagues at the NASA Glenn Research Center.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/08/space-age-material-can-insulate-homes-clothes

The synthesis of synthetic spider silk has numerous commercial applications due to its very high tensile strength.

emergentfutures:

Scientists Close-In On Artificial Spider Silk By X-Raying The Real Stuff

Paging Peter Parker: Scientists have taken another step closer to producing viable artificial spider silk by zooming-in on the nanoscopic structure of the natural, spider-made stuff, using the brightest X-ray beams in the Western Hemisphere.

Full Story: Idea Lab

Biohacking at work.

joshbyard:

Hacking Spider Silk to Create Nano-Electronic Components:

As a protein-based polymer, spider silk is naturally insulating, so the researchers are exploring what happens when it’s coated with iodine, gold, or carbon nanotubes. In all three cases, the silk turned into a more conductive fiber. However, “gold really likes spider silk,” Steven told scientists at the American Physical Society’s March meeting in Boston. “Gold nanoparticles adhere to spider silk very well.”

The team started with 3.5-μm-wide silk harvested from Nephila clavipes, the golden orb-weaving spider. They placed the silk in a vacuum chamber and coated it with gold. The resulting fiber had electrical conductivity from the gold plus flexibility from the silk, and it measured only 1/25th the diameter of a human hair. That allowed the fibers to be used—even without conductive paste—as contacts on tiny organic crystals, which the lab chills to cryogenic temperatures to study their superconductivity.

Standard wires made of gold or other metals aren’t elastic enough and tend to lose contact with the soft organic crystals as temperatures change. The group found that the gold-coated silk fibers worked as contacts down to the lowest temperature they tested at, about 260 millikelvin.

The researchers also coated the silk with carbon nanotubes, creating highly sensitive strain sensors. Those could be used as heart-pulse monitors, Steven suggests.

Meanwhile, the iodine-doped silk showed changes in conductivity that depended on relative humidity. But the science didn’t stop there.

Steven heated the iodine-doped silk in an argon atmosphere to 800°C, creating a pyrolyzed, carbon-coated fiber that turned out to be a p-type semiconductor. The researchers then used those fibers to make filaments for incandescent bulbs.

Steven says the group is working on using the functionalized silk to make electronic components, such as diodes, inductors, and capacitors. It should be possible to build a field-effect transistor out of the semiconducting version of the material. (Other labs have already used silk from the silk moth, Bombyx mori, as the gate insulator in a transistor.)

Conducting and semiconducting fibers could be readily woven into fabrics to make so-called smart textiles, such as shirts that could sense temperature or other environmental changes. Combining the Florida State research with efforts under way elsewhere to create spider silk artificially might allow engineers to mass-produce fibers with tunable electrical properties, Steven says.

(via Spider Silk Weaves New Path for Electronics - IEEE Spectrum)

(Photo: Spider Silk Glands Source)

The alloy of the future?

14-billion-years-later:

Shape-Memory Alloy

A shape-memory alloy is exactly what it sounds like: an alloy of two (or more) metals that somehow can “remember” the original shape it was folded into. One of the more famous examples of this is nickel-titanium, or nitinol, will spontaneously fold from a crumpled state back to the ordered, cold forged state when heated. A video of this process can be seen here. This works because of a small phase change in the metal itself, when shaped the atoms arrange themselves into organized crystal structures. Distorting the metal then causes these crystal structures to become disorganized and energetically unfavourable, application of heat then allows the original crystal structure to be formed again by overcoming the energy barrier. The special thing about SMA’s is that the crystal structures can be reversed while in most alloys the structures naturally decay due to diffusion of atoms within the metal.

Shape-memory alloys have many applications, ranging from uses in medicine and robotics right through to the more novel, as seen in this lamp designed by Japanese design group Nendo. In this case the heat from the bulb causes the lamp to “bloom” as the strips of alloy move back to their preformed shape.

futurescope:

Bayer MaterialScience develops polyurethane system that can reduce the weight of components in cars by 30%

[…] Demand for lightweight construction systems in the automotive industry is now at an all-time high, with the aim being to cut fuel consumption, costs and CO₂ emissions. According to VCD Verkehrsclub Deutschland, reducing the weight of a vehicle by 100 kilograms lowers fuel consumption by 0.5 liters over a distance of 100 kilometers and cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 1.2 kilograms over the same distance. Lightweight structures are now more important than ever given the trend toward future-oriented drive technologies such as electric mobility. 

Bayer MaterialScience has already developed a wide range of energy-efficient polyurethane materials for the automotive sector. At UTECH 2012, it is going one step further with the presentation of the Bayflex® RIM Light Weight polyurethane system that can be used to further reducing the weight of finished components by up to 30 percent. With a density of just 0.9 kilograms per liter, this material is even lighter than water. […]

[press release] [more about lighter and stronger future materials in the automotive industry] [image credit: airstage]

(via futurescope)