Lightest material

I wanted to share a post taken from BBC’s Technology News highlighting a new material. The possibilities are exciting.

A team of engineers claims to have created the world’s lightest material.

The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice – a crisscrossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes.

The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has “extraordinarily high energy absorption” properties.

Potential uses include next-generation batteries and shock absorbers.

The research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology and is published in the latest edition of Science.

“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.

Low-density

The resulting material has a density of 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre.

By comparison the density of silica aerogels – the world’s lightest solid materials – is only as low as 1.0mg per cubic cm.

The metallic micro-lattices have the edge because they consist of 99.99% air and of 0.01% solids.

The engineers say the material’s strength derives from the ordered nature of its lattice design.

By contrast, other ultralight substances, including aerogels and metallic foams, have random cellular structures. This means they are less stiff, strong, energy absorptive or conductive than the bulk of the raw materials that they are made out of.

William Carter, manager of architected materials at HRL, compared the new material to larger low-density structures.

“Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture,” he said.

“We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales.”

Robust

To study the strength of the metallic micro-lattices the team compressed them until they were half as thick.

After removing the load the substance recovered 98% of its original height and resumed its original shape.

The first time the stress test was carried out and repeated the material became less stiff and strong, but the team says that further compressions made very little difference.

“Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nano scale,” said team member Lorenzo Valdevit.

“Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the micro-lattice and you have a unique cellular material.”

The engineers suggest practical uses for the substance include thermal insulation, battery electrodes and products that need to dampen sound, vibration and shock energy.

I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole when I came across Kostas Terzidis words framing an etymology of ‘design’ in his 2006 published work “Algorithmic Architecture” by Architectural Press. My journey started in chapter one as he explained origins for design, innovation, novelty, and originality as a preservation of their meaning from often abused reference by practitioners discussing their design process. I became intrigued by the end of the chapter when Kostas argues that the investigative nature of design requires a forgetting, to see things as they really are; to erase false connections and return to the origin. This sets the stage as he discussed the potential of algorithms, when solutions are unknown or forgotten, for exploring (problem-addressing) versus its association with a logical mechanism for problem-solving (tied to memory).

With this mindset an algorithmic process could be freed to explore with heuristic and adaptive decision procedures. This embraces the unpredictable, impossible or unknown so they are not feared but can be a launching point for exploration.

Protein Folding LDRD

Physorg.com announced that Jeremy Smith & Oak Ridge National Laboratory helped scientist take a significant step towards understanding the mystery of protein folding. Why is this important? Proteins are a chain of amino acids that take shapes by folding and it is this shape that determines if a protein is an antibody that fights infections or turn food into energy or copy DNA, etc… without its shape the protein is worthless. This discovery could start to unlock protein mysteries that affect our health and longevity.

So why should I talk about this on a blog for architecture. Folding in nature, a kind of molecular origami, brings to light that a 3D structure can generate a unique function with its simple building blocks. Structure has always been important to architecture and new science continues to provides new paradigms for architecture to consider in it search for ideas that generate form and function.

Nature has repeatedly shown us patterns that architects and designers have turned into an iconography, an idea of nature. However science is showing us that patterns generated from folding bring about form that has purpose beyond an exuberant sculptural edifice. Charles Jencks touched on this during a conference in 2004 for The Order of Nature: New Science, New Urbanism–New Archtecture? …“today we need a cross coding and parity between ourselves and these patterns. Natural patterns should be criticized with our own narratives of hope and desire, because there is a duality between us and the universe. We come from nature, but we are also slightly separate from it by our ability to reflect, understand and transform it. Our relation to nature is quixotic and interactive. It is co‐creative and therefore we need a kind of pattern language that builds in nature, on the one hand, and builds in our antithesis and critique, on the other.”

Learning from nature and moving beyond the grid could open doors to new possibilities for architecture. Achim Menges has been exploring with students how geometric logic would act upon a material system. Their explorations exemplifies how a simple building blocks can be folded to achieve architecture.

Desire is often measured by its visible manifestations. The source of this desire can be linked back to critical questions asked at the beginning of a  design process.

Calcium carbonate, commonly known as chalk, is the fifth most abundant material on the planet and typically a fragile saw toothed structure. When actions of the abalone lays down layer upon layer of the calcium carbonate material between sheets of protein, its actions at microscopic scale, create a tough and crystalline material. Schneiderism post “Of Metamaterial and Invisibility” expands on how properties of structure will shift our limitations and open new doors into making a physical place for our activities.

For architecture to move beyond building techniques established from centuries of craft and habit, we need to take a fresh look at the beginning of the making process, we need to understand the potential of structure.

Richard Serra, “Verb List” [1962-1968]

Richard Serra over forty plus years ago listed a typology of actions for his hand-manipulated pieces. Today Serra continues his work by a choreography of people acting upon materials to create pieces with their own space, make their own situation and declare their own area.

The video work of Robert Hodgin is memorizing which can be seen on his site Flight404.com. But it is his “Flocking in a flowfield” video that illustrates the power of order through entropy. The idea of Flocking starts to provide a model for coordination with a complexity of members. Flocking, when understood, could become a design management strategy that manifest built environments with a system of flow and formations of materials.

An architectural project’s genesis starts from desire. This desire drives client/user and architect/s to conjoin and sythesise an argument for action. This public dialog looks to investigate how desire is shifting techniques, technology and methodologies for new possibilities with architecture.