Scientists report that a metamaterial is the first to achieve the kind of performance predicted by theoretical bounds.
Its lightness, strength, and versatility lends itself well to a variety of applications, from buildings to vehicles to packaging and transport, says Jonathan Berger, mechanical engineer and materials scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He developed the material in 2015 and reports these findings in a letter published in Nature.
Called Isomax, the beauty of the solid foam—in this case loosely defined as a combination of a stiff substance and air pockets—lay in the geometry within. Instead of the typical assemblage of bubbles or a honeycomb arrangement, the ordered cells were set apart by walls forming the shapes of pyramids with three sides and a base, and octahedra, reinforced inside with a “cross” of intersecting diagonal walls.
The combination of the pyramid and cross-shaped cells, says Berger, resulted in a structure that had low density—mostly air, in fact—yet was uncommonly strong for its mass.
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