Plate-lattice metamaterial 'tougher and lighter' than aluminium
Plastics have been combined with carbon nanotubes to create 3D-printed plate-lattice metamaterials claimed to be tougher and lighter than similar forms of aluminium.
The material, developed by a team led by Glasgow University engineers, could lead to the development of safer, lighter and more durable structures for use in the aerospace, automotive, renewables and marine industries. The team describe how they have developed a new plate-lattice cellular metamaterial in Materials & Design.
Metamaterials are a class of artificially-created cellular solids, designed and engineered with properties which do not occur in the natural world.
One form of metamaterials - plate-lattices - are cubic structures made from intersecting layers of plates that exhibit unusually high stiffness and strength, despite featuring a significant amount of space, known as porosity, between the plates. This porosity also makes plate-lattices unusually lightweight.
The researchers set out to investigate whether new forms of plate-lattice design, manufactured from a plastic-nanotube composite they developed, could make a metamaterial with more advanced properties of stiffness, strength, and toughness.
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