World's lightest material is a metal 100 times lighter than styrofoam

摘要

A team of researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have developed the world's lightest material - with a density of 0.9 mg/cc - about one hundred times lighter than Styro-foam. Their findings appear in the Nov. 18 issue of Science. The new material redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique "micro-lattice" cellular architecture. The researchers were able to make a material that consists of 99.99% air by designing the 0.01% solid at the nanometer, micron and millimeter scales. "The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said lead author Dr. Tobias Schaedler of HRL.