Graphene aerogel takes world’s lightest material crown

http://www.gizmag.com/graphene-aerogel-worlds-lightest/26784/

by Lightning • 13 years ago

37 32 13 years ago

joezydeco• 13 years ago

So if we wrap this material in mylar and remove the air, we'd have solid balloons without needing helium? Sounds good to me.

gonvaled4• 13 years ago

Great idea! How to control buoyancy? I guess you need some ballast to keep the whole system close to air density, and a pump to put / remove air, for fine tuning depending on conditions (temperature, ...) and what you want to do (go up / down)

SoftwareMaven• 13 years ago

Helium balloons don't need all that. They get by with significant positive buoyancy and a simple string. Seems reasonable for any balloon replacement to do the same.

mickdarling2• 13 years ago

Sadly, it is highly compressible, so air pressure would just crush the mylar ballon around it. If you could make this material rigid, so the balloon would be able to displace the proper volume of air, then you could make party balloons and airships without wasting helium.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 13 years ago

So basically, what you're saying is hoverboards are possible.

andrewflnr• 13 years ago

Wouldn't it be just as easy to make a lightweight shell around a vacuum?

EthanHeilman• 13 years ago

What would be the economic implications of "float stone", that is a solid material which is lighter than air or at least neutrally buoyant? Say a molecular structure that creates pockets of vacuum at the micro scale.

gonvaled4• 13 years ago

Floating buildings? Floating roads?

Crazy things ...

loceng• 13 years ago

Avatar.

arnarbi2• 13 years ago

Strap one on your back and you can swim in the atmosphere like a diver in water.

Although it would have to be over 66 cubic meters for an 80kg person in 20°C air. If it is spherical, it would be c.a. 5 m in diameter.

saalweachter• 13 years ago

I wonder if you would create a hazard for rockets, once enough float stones had been dropped and were drifting around whatever layer of atmosphere they were neutrally buoyant with respect to.

I guess it might not be a hazard at all. Firstly, they wouldn't be traveling at orbital velocities, and secondly, since the premise is that they are the same density as the air, hitting a float stone at Mach N might not be any worse than hitting the air at Mach N.

samstave• 13 years ago

I love graphene and aerogel. Graphene aerogel is super interesting.

What I would like to see is a graphene base capacitor/circuit 3d printed and insulated by regular aerogel. Where you have a circuit which is completely protected by the insulting aerogel.

solistice• 13 years ago

What did the aerogel do to become insulting?

btilly• 13 years ago

They claim less dense than helium. Then they show it not floating in air.

Something is not right there.

DigitalJack2• 13 years ago

It's porous, so think of it as a sponge soaked with air.

The sponge that one washes a car with will float on water until it is soaked with water.

PanMan• 13 years ago

So the sponge material itself must be heavier than water, e.g, more than 1 kg/L. Otherwise it would still float. Same holds here

andrewaylett• 13 years ago

They're talking about the density of the structure, not of the actual material the structure is made from. It's porous and non-rigid, and doesn't exclude air, so it's still got negative buoyancy in air.

eah13• 13 years ago

Note that this is the world's least dense material, not the world's lightest. They mention the density measurements but conflate it with weight in the title and elsewhere.

Sigh, journalism. Sigh.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

This should be an interesting experiment, test to see how much charge the graphene will hold.

Being less dense than air means that its structure won't inhibit attraction/repulsion and being conductive means that it will be able to transport charge to its surface. And just like an 'air' balloon you can stick to the roof after rubbing it to your head, it seems like it should be able to do the equivalent of a Van de Graf charge transfer inside the "block" to transfer charge to the graphene.

At which point you can make a balloon which 'repels' the Earth (or is attracted to it).

Interesting times indeed.

Graphene aerogel takes world’s lightest material crown

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