100x lighter than styrofoam. I wonder what % of weight the styrofoam blank is on an average board.

www.smh.com.au/technology/scientists-invent-lightest-material-on-earth-what-now-20111118-1nmok.html

be interesting to know it's strength for it's weight

Splitting hairs but they haven't invented the "lightest material on earth". The material is nickel but it is arranged in such a manner that there is lots of air. They have invented a way of using an existing material.

I was all excited thinking they had a new polymer (ie new compound) like a foam that was reasonable cost and we could all use, rather they are just doing trick stuff with existing materials

That was my first thought, "can they build a windsurfer from it"? One can only dream.

yeah but if a board was super light, like 1.5 Kg, would it work at all ?
Or would it just be uncontrollable and blow away with any gusts ?

LeStef said...

yeah but if a board was super light, like 1.5 Kg, would it work at all ?
Or would it just be uncontrollable and blow away with any gusts ?

It would probably depend on how strong the wind and the water state. If you had a board that little mass despite having a reasonable volume then it would be great for getting going in light breezes. However it would become quite a handful in stronger winds. I remember reading a magazine article where two boards of the same design but with different construction methods were compared to each other. The testers prefered the heavier board as they found it more controllable.

There is a fair chance they tested the board at a location that was windy like the Red Sea or Canary Islands. If they tested the boards in marginal wind conditions the results may have been different.

barn said...

Mark _australia said...

They have invented a way of using an existing material.

So there can't be any new materials until we discover new elements?.. That's a drag..

Isn't Glass fibre a different material than plate glass, which are both also different from sand? Even though it's all Silicon dioxide, the Raw Material..

No, all I said was it is not the "lightest material" on earth. rather it is a useful rearrangement of a material

It is like if I stretched out a bit of bubblegum to 2km long and then said it is lighter than another bit of bubblegum. No, it is just light for it's size. As is the lattice thingy they have made.
It is wonderful what they have done, but the reporter got carried away in the description IMHO

And glass fibre would not be much good if the resin never happened and likewise it is a useful rearrangement of an existing material

I am starting to think of a similar lattice with carbon nanotubes, shaped and used as a board core........

Maybe boards don't need to have an EPS blank, maybe they could bring this technology back:

www.airinside.ch/uk_boards.htm

From the makers/designer/scientists paper..

"Ultralight (<10 milligrams per cubic centimeter) cellular materials are desirable for thermal insulation; battery electrodes; catalyst supports; and acoustic, vibration, or shock energy damping. We present ultralight materials based on periodic hollow-tube microlattices. These materials are fabricated by starting with a template formed by self-propagating photopolymer waveguide prototyping, coating the template by electroless nickel plating, and subsequently etching away the template. The resulting metallic microlattices exhibit densities ρ ≥ 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter, complete recovery after compression exceeding 50% strain, and energy absorption similar to elastomers. Young's modulus E scales with density as E ~ ρ2, in contrast to the E ~ ρ3 scaling observed for ultralight aerogels and carbon nanotube foams with stochastic architecture. We attribute these properties to structural hierarchy at the nanometer, micrometer, and millimeter scales."