Ultra-light aluminum: Chemists report breakthrough in material design

SOUL-DRIFTER

Life Long Researcher
Well they are getting there.
One step at a time.


Schematic depiction of a supertetrahedral aluminum crystal structure. Scientists from Utah State University, USA and Southern Federal University, Russia, computationally designed a new, metastable, ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum. Credit: Iliya Getmanskii, Southern Federal University, Russia

If you drop an aluminum spoon in a sink full of water, the spoon will sink to the bottom. That's because aluminum, in its conventional form, is denser than water says Utah State University chemist Alexander Boldyrev.
But if you restructure the common household metal at the molecular level, as Boldyrev and colleagues did using computational modeling, you could produce an ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum that's lighter than water. Boldyrev, along with scientists Iliya Getmanskii, Vitaliy Koval, Rusian Minyaev and Vladimir Minkin of Southern Federal University in Rostov-on Don, Russia, published findings in the Sept. 18, 2017, online edition of The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

The team's research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russian Ministry of Science and Education.

"My colleagues' approach to this challenge was very innovative," says Boldyrev, professor in USU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "They started with a known crystal lattice, in this case, a diamond, and substituted every carbon atom with an aluminum tetrahedron."
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Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-ultra-light-aluminum-chemists-breakthrough-material.html#jCp
 

Toroid

Founding Member
I wonder how many years it'll take to get to market. Beer & soda cans could be even lighter. In the long run it could be beneficial for the environment.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
That would be more interesting in optics as a lens, than as structural material. It must be that it is transparent for some wavelengths.
 
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