Scientists Design Super-Light Carbon Nanostructure That's Stronger Than Diamond

 Scientists have found a brand new thanks to structure carbon at the nanoscale, making a fabric that's superior to diamond on the strength-to-density ratio.

While the small carbon lattice has been fabricated and tested within the lab, it is a very good distance of practical use. But this new approach could help us build stronger and lighter materials within the future - which are some things that are of great interest to industries like aerospace and aviation. 

What we're talking about here are some things called nanolattices - porous structures just like the one within the image above that's made from three-dimensional carbon struts and braces. thanks to their unique structure, they're incredibly strong and light-weight.

Usually, these nanolattices are based around a cylindrical framework (they're called beam-nanolattices). But the team has now created plate-nanolattices, structures based around tiny plates.

This subtle shift might not sound like much, but the researchers say it can make an enormous difference when it involves strength.

Based on early experiments and calculations, the plate approach promises a 639 percent increase in strength and a 522 percent increase in rigidity over the beam nanolattice approach.

"Scientists have predicted that nanolattices arranged during a plate-based design would be incredibly strong," says materials scientist Cameron Crook, from the University of California, Irvine (UCI).

"But the issue in manufacturing structures this manner meant that the speculation was never proven until we succeeded in doing it."

To finally test these materials within the lab, the researchers used a fancy 3D laser printing called two-photon polymerization direct laser writing, which essentially uses carefully managed chemical reactions inside a ray to etch out shapes at the tiniest of scales.

Using liquid resin sensitive to actinic radiation, the method shoots photons at the resin to show it into a solid polymer in an exceedingly particular shape. Additional steps are then required to get rid of excess resin and to heat up the structure to mend it in situ.

What the scientists have managed to try and do here actually comes near the utmost theoretical stiffness and strength of a fabric of this kind – limits called the Hashin-Shtrikman and Suquet upper bounds.

As confirmed by a scanning microscope, these are the primary actual experiments to indicate that those theoretical limits are often reached, though we're still a protracted way off having the ability to manufacture this material at a bigger scale.

In fact, a part of the material's strength lies in its tiny size: as objects like this get shrunk below 100 nanometres – one thousand times smaller than the thickness of a personality's hair – the pores and cracks in them get ever smaller, reducing potential flaws.

As for a way these nanolattices might eventually be used, they'll certainly be of interest to aerospace engineers – their combination of strength and denseness makes them ideal for aircraft and spacecraft.

"Previous beam-based designs, while of great interest, had not been so efficient in terms of mechanical properties," says engineer Jens Bauer, from UCI.

"This new class of plate-nanolattices that we've created is dramatically stronger and stiffer than the simplest beam-nanolattices."