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Paper Stronger Than Cast Iron
TaeKwonDood writes "All paper is made of cellulose, which at the nanoscale level is quite strong, but paper processing makes large, fragile fibers that break easily. Researchers in Sweden have have come up with a manufacturing process that keeps the fibers small, resulting in 'nanopaper' with over 1.6 times the tensile strength of cast iron (214 megapascals vs. 130 mPa). And since cellulose is the most abundant organic compound on the planet, it's cheap to use compared to other exotic, expensive-to-produce options — such as carbon nanotubes."
It's strong enough to build a ship out of... as long as you don't get it wet.
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Coming next summer, the Epic battle between Robert Downy Jr. as Iron Man, and an unknown antagonists who goes by the mysterious PAPER MAN! /attempt at humor
Or treatable to be fire-resistant?
I can see a lot of uses for it even if it isn't. But I can see some fairly awe-inspiring ones if it's possible.
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> 214 megapascals vs. 130 mPa
214 megapascal (singular, it's a unit) is about 1.6*10^9 more than 130 millipascal. Use your units properly.
It's just like irony but stronger
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Perfect for government documents and voting machine audit results. :)
This is hardly surprising given that the source for most paper is wood, and wood has the highest tensile strength of any building material known to man based either on weight or cross sectional area.
Not a lot of our building techniques rely primarily on tensile strength, most rely on spanning gaps with weight bearing members. But if you have to hang something heavy, Wood is your friend.
Tensile strength does come into play on collapsing structures, as weight bearing members are removed, and buildings end up hanging from their walls or rafters. Firefighters really dislike entering steel framed buildings, when fighting active fires because steel softens and collapses without warning, where as wood groans and snaps and gives ample warning that it is about to collapse.
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But... cast iron has the tensile strength on the order of concrete. Which is to say, not much at all. Good job guys, you've shown that paper is about as strong as... paper! How did this get published?
This is going to mess up so many games of Paper, Rock, and Scissors.
Wait, so paper beats scissors now?
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With the paper there is the advantage that small particle sizes dramaticly increase strength.
Fantastic!
Tm
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wood has the highest tensile strength of any building material known to man based either on weight or cross sectional area.
No, steel does. That's why I-beams are steel, not wood. It's also why the cables in suspension bridges are steel, not wood poles.
Not a lot of our building techniques rely primarily on tensile strength, most rely on spanning gaps with weight bearing members.
And what determines how well you can span a gap? A combination of compressive and tensile strength. You need to revise your beam bending...
Tensile strength does come into play on collapsing structures, as weight bearing members are removed, and buildings end up hanging from their walls or rafters.
So what does some in to play? Probably a mixture of tensile and compressive strength, depending on what is failing and why.
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Great, just what I need - newspapers that groan and snap when I try to read them.
apparently the nanobonds are more porous... would be nice to see some comparison statistics on the physical properties between nanopaper and regular paper per square inch say.
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Icebike wrote
>...wood has the highest tensile strength of any building material known to man based either on weight or cross sectional area.
I Think your estimate of wood is much too high. Wikipedia's article of tensile strength http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile_strength lists pine wood at 40 MPa I know there are some woods that are significantly stronger but still.
For comparison some other tensile strengths listed in MPa are:
Cast Iron 200
structural steel 400
steel piano wire 2500
Concrete 3
HDPE plastic 37
Aluminum Aloy 455
Glass 4710
Carbon fiber 5650
Carbon nanotubes 63000
There's already health concerns and risk with other nano technologies, what about paper? I'm around printers all day long and see a great deal of paper dust. What if there were made up of nano particles and got into the respiratory system of people?
> No, steel does. That's why I-beams are steel, not
> wood. It's also why the cables in suspension
> bridges are steel, not wood poles.
The same weight of wood would be stronger.
Some respect has to be paid to longevity. Who would use wood suspension cables in termite country?
There are also problems of attaching wood to other objects. Hard to weld wood you know.
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but where does this leave me?
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Cuz Paper beats Rock!
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Even when adjusting for weight, the tensile strength of wood isn't so great compared to S-glass or carbon fiber. And when adjusting for cross sectional area, the tensile strength of wood fares even worse because it has a lot of air in its pores.
The same weight of wood would be stronger.
But not the same cross-sectional size.
Ever tried writing on iron? Not as easy... and folding it to put it in your pocket tends to be difficult.
On another note, mPa? Really? 214 megapascals vs 130 MILLIpascals? Ever heard of SI? That lack of capitalization causes problems. : )
(it's from TFS, guys)
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Sure, just don't use it in a humid and/or hot environment, where there's a good possibility of sweating on it.
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Given climatic changes I think we may want to think this one over.
:-).
.. aaaagh!
:-)
I can see someone building a skyscraper, only for the whole thing to fall over because someone has an aiming problem in an urinoir midlevel. And God help you if you want to redo the wallpaper
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Joking aside, interesting development. Puts the final nail into the paperless office.
No! Aaargh! I'll stop making bad jokes now!
Insert
"Ever tried writing on iron? Not as easy... and folding it to put it in your pocket tends to be difficult."
However, if you etch a piece of metal, you can use it as a stamp to create numerous copies of the etching, and when you hit severe writers block, its much easier to kill yourself with a piece of tin than paper cuts.
I would guess the application of interest is shipping boxes and so forth. If you want things well-protected, increasingly important in a shipping industry that uses more robots and conveyor belts and fewer human hands every day, you need strong boxes. Probably even a modest increase in the strength of cardboard would be quite helpful, as it would reduce the fraction of the weight of a shipment that is boxing.
/. editor to know something about materials science and/or economics? I would not.
It all depends, really, on whether the processing needed to create "super" paper doesn't cost more than the savings you might enjoy in lower shipping costs per unit weight of product. The fact mentioned in the summary that the original material (wood) is cheap seems quite unimportant.* Steel come essentially from dirt and rock, which is cheap, too. It's the processing that costs.
--------------
* But would I expect a
The only conclusion I can come to is that I am superman
Touche! I'll remember this the next time I'm trying to kill myself with the object I'm writing on. : )
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And they laughed when I made papier-mâché throwing stars. I'll show them! I am the Paper Ninja (played by Matthew Lillard), and I've just come from OfficeMax!
Apparently Superman didn't take simple physics at school otherwise he would know what tensile strength meant...
I'd be interested to know how this stuff stands up to shear: a lot of materials are very strong in one way but incredibly weak in another. Ever try tearing a piece of paper in half by grabbing the two ends and pulling straight apart? It's a lot harder than you would think, but you can easily tear that same piece of paper with two fingers of each hand by applying shear.
If it's loaded in pure tension, you're right, wood is stronger per unit weight. However one thing that you have be careful of with wood beams is that wood has a very low shear strength which makes beams fail at much lower loads than you would expect from the tensile strength alone. It also isn't very strong in tension across the grain which limits your design freedom.
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This comparison is highly suspicuous. You do not use cast iron for anything that needs tensile strenght, as it breaks too easily. Wrought iron is a whole different matter and is what is used in construction of cars, ships, girders, and the like. Cast iron in the shape of a pice of paper could easily broken by hand without tools.
It seems aluminum alloy has about twice the tensile strength of cast iron. Ever tried to rip tinfoil? Not that difficult.
Side note: mPA is milipascals, not megapascals.
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...Jules Verne wrote about a heavier-than-air airship that was made from paper, treated with glue and pressed into shape. the resulting material was "as strong as the best steels, and much lighter", to quote the author.
the novel is called Robur-le-Conquerant (Robur the Conqueror) (1886)
Note that carbon nanotubes might cause cancer. I wonder how this paper fibers that are threated will be in the health department. Paper sounds fine, but that is the same what they thought of asbestos.
I say it will be a nice turnabout. Usually I groan and snap when I read newspapers.
I just wonder... how come this wasn't invented in Soviet Russia?
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Well of course he didn't.
Had he taken any physics, he would know he couldn't fly. Tell me, then, what would have happened to Metropolis?
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Anyone who has ever used a public toilet in Sweden would know that this has been in development for some time.
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Not only that, but steel is also slightly less flammable than wood (or paper).
In many situations, it is difficult or next to impossible to get the stresses in a structure to be compatible with the grain structure of the wood.
Timber structures have to be heavily engineered to ensure the stresses occur with the proper orientation to the grain. This often makes them too expensive in comparison to steel.
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