By far the lightest metal material in the world comes from Boeing, the world's largest manufacturer of civilian and military aircraft. Its components include metal and 99.99% of air.
Boeing has already demonstrated on the YouTube channel. Incredibly, it was so light that it could be placed on a dandelion. This ultra-light metal material is called "microlattice", and Boeing says it is not only extremely lightweight but also very hard. If an egg is wrapped in this material, it will not be broken if it is dropped from a 25-storey building. . Microlattice material is a 3D porous polymer material composed of connected hollow tubes. The thickness of the hollow tube wall is less than one thousandth of the diameter of a human hair.
In addition to its ultra-low-density structure, the porous design of the micro-lattice metal produces special metal mechanical properties. After the compressed volume becomes 50% less tension, it can still fully recover its original shape and has super high energy absorption capacity. Because the metal micro-lattice is composed of interconnected hollow pillars; the diameter of each pillar is ~ 100um, 100um behind the wall, 99.99% of the entire structure is air; the apparent density is 0.9g / cm3, which is a synthetic Porous extremely light 3D open honeycomb polymer structure metal material. This innovative material is 100 times lighter than foam and is similar to the structure of bones (the outside of bones is very hard, but most of its interior is actually a honeycomb hollow structure). Therefore they are not easily broken and they are very light.
It is reported that the original design of microgrid metal came from the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was used to manufacture battery electrodes, catalyst carriers, and has acoustic, vibration, and impact energy suppression. It can be used in the design of aerospace industry in the future. In addition, Boeing will also cooperate with NASA to apply this ultra-light metal material to future spacecraft, which can reduce the mass of deep space exploration spacecraft by 40%, thereby enabling deeper and wider exploration of the universe.
Microlattice material is a 3D open honeycomb polymer structure, which is similar to the structure of bones (the outside of bones is very hard, but most of the inside is actually a honeycomb hollow structure)