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The Orange Goo That Could Save Your Laptop
Barence writes "A British company has patented what can only be described as an orange goo that could save your laptop or iPod after a nasty fall. The amazing material is soft and malleable like putty, but the substance becomes solid instantly after impact. You can punch your fist into a ball of the material sitting on a desk and not feel a thing, according to the staff at PC Pro who have been testing the material, called 3do. It's being used by the military, the US downhill ski team, and motorcycle clothing manufacturers to provide impact protection in the event of a crash. However, it's also appearing in protective cases for laptops and MP3 players."
Isn't the point of protection to absorb the impact? That's why bubble-wrap is squishy. If this instantly turns solid, wouldn't that mean that the g-forces, the energy of the impact is not absorbed by it and is thus transferred to the item inside?
But is it orange?
you could ski uphill
flubber?
First of, it's 3do (three-dee-oh): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D3o
3DO was a video game company and console: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_3DO_Company
This product, as applied to laptop cases, was recently pitched on Dragon's Den (BBC): http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/entrepreneurs/jasonroberts.shtml
I hope not! :) And I'd hate to find out!
So this is what they're doing with all that left over building sand from the stagnating construction industry.
Impact resistance is complicated, but there's parts that are very, very simple. Let's say you drop your laptop from five feet up. When it hits the ground, it'll be going at a certain velocity (I am currently too lazy to calculate it) with a certain amount of momentum. That velocity and momentum will go into crushing the impact point against the ground. If the impact point is forced to decelerate rapidly, and is a small enough point, it'll be subject to a huge amount of force. Boom, shattered plastic.
Now we add padding. The thing about padding is that it doesn't actually reduce the velocity or momentum in any way (in fact, unless it's literally weightless, it *increases* momentum.) It also doesn't change the basic physical requirements - that momentum will get absorbed somewhere. Guaranteed.
There's two ways the padding helps. First, it lets your dropped object decelerate more slowly - instead of having to go from fall to stop in a tiny distance (namely, the amount your laptop plastic deforms without permanent damage) it goes from fall to stop in a much larger distance - the distance that the padding can be compressed. (Plus the plastic deformation.)
Second, it provides - potentially - a larger impact zone, distributing the force more equally over the plastic of the laptop. A force that would shatter a corner may not do much at all distributed over a few square inches.
The first part, unfortunately, has some very basic physical limits. If the padding is an eighth of an inch thick, it will provide, at most, an eighth of an inch of extra speed reduction. There is just no way to improve this until you fit your shock absorber with little rockets and sensors to determine when it's about to impact the ground.
The second part is a lot more theoretically capable, but also a whole lot harder to solve. The ideal situation is a material that somehow deforms at the impact spot in exactly the manner that lets it stop at its maximum deformation point, without any extra jerks or impacts, while simultaneously spreading the impact over the entire surface of the protected item.
That is a damn hard thing to accomplish. If he's succeeded in it, or in anything remotely like it, I'm impressed.
The press releases seem to feel that d3o is absolutely fantastic for human garments, where the fabric has to be malleable until the impact occurs. That's quite different from electronics protection, where malleability is simply not an issue, and I'm not convinced that it will make the changeover smoothly.
We'll see.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_mud
now you can protect your ipod from yourself
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Slashdot always seems to be the slowest site to break news.
And this differs from Silly Putty how?
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Isn't that something every man wanted? Sounds like a perfect material for condom!
Though I'd worry orange penis would turn off sex desire.
GOO is shit in indian language!!!!
14 September 2006
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EBWGbhsuws
I remember seeing this on nickelodeon.
...Tixotropes. They have been around for a long time, and you can even make them using standard household ingredients (homemade silly putty f.e..)
Does this remind anyone else of the armorgel in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash?
Liquid that hardens on impact, mostly used in body armor, looks like gritty jello... Certainly sounds like the same kinda stuff.
I hope Stephenson's getting a cut. So many things from that book have come to pass that I'm getting worried about an insane Aelut showing up with a nuke...
My professor in engineering mechanics showed me a sample of a material with very similar color and characteristics sometime around october '08. Now I know, where I can get a sample for goofing around ;)
However, this won't protect your precious harddisk. It works very well for protecting humans, mainly because it adapts to the form of the pressing surfaces (aka your head and a wall) and then distributes the pressure over a bigger area. It does almost nothing though for the rate of deceleration - face it, your notebook, falling from the table goes from v^2=2*g*s (s= table height, let's say 0.8m)=4m/s to zero in about - well, let's say 1mm as this stuff gets rigid very quickly. This makes it face a deceleration of 8000g. Hell, let's say 5mm and it's still 1600g. Nope, this won't save your harddisk as they're rated for 300 to 500g in every direction and a lot less when active. Thinking about it, it seems like a good idea for the notebook to come apart on impact, as this might give your harddisk another few millimeters for controlled deceleration and thus keep it withing mechanical specs.
In other words: Yes, the surface of your precious Macbook will be scratchfree after the fall, the harddisk will still be toast.
We have a video test of the iBand that shows how d3o works and features a drop test. http://recombu.com/news/tech21-iband-serious-impact-protection-proved-on-video-_M11064-1.html
Should have covered the Beagle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 ) in that stuff
---
"His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, an excess of perspiration wafts through it like a napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel; feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books."
Great! Good thing my boxing gloves are orange, no one is going to notice it. Hehehehe...
My sig is better than your sig.
"The amazing material is soft and malleable like putty, but the substance becomes solid instantly after impact."
-It's useless it if it turns solid AFTER impact. The article states that it turns solid DURING impact. "AFTER" and "DURING" are two different things.
Either way, I'd like to know what happens when it is subjected to the prolonged temperatures of systems in the field. Will it it keep its intended state and shape, or will it ooze out all over the place?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Billy Mays here! ... but if you call now we'll send you 3 for the price of one!
s/©//g
The behavior of this stuff sounds a bit like the Smart Mass Thinking Putty I have from ThinkGeek.com.
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
Too early man, too early. That guy made my night everytime my earsdrums nearly broke everytime his commercial came on.
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
what can only be described as an orange goo
Around here, we're a technically savvy group with relatively high IQs. You can describe it as a highly viscous non-newtonian fluid containing enough long-chain polymers or waxes to prevent it from flowing freely when at rest, and most of us will get it, and the rest will be able to look it up.
Assuming you're trying to describe it to a bunch of first graders, you can also describe it as "orange silly putty", and it'll be a hell of a lot more accurate than "orange goo".
Raise the bar, people.
Larry Niven and Ringworld, anyone ?
Am I the only one who instantly thought of the "securefoam" stuff in the copcar in Demolition Man ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMmhNbj4K68
The protection has less to do with absorption reduction than a distribution of force.
Of course. They evolved to be that way, to maximize their fitness in an environment full of size queens.
Yes, because never in our history (cough, Great Pyramids, cough) have we humans ever been accused of having inadequacy issues.
Somehow I think this "evolution" started well before someone thought to take a truck and bolt a "trunk" on it.
Could it be any more obvious??
Isn't the real problem with dropping a laptop or iPod going to be the head inside the hard drive? I don't think the orange goo would help with that.
...So some guy puts cornstarch, water, and orange food dye in a Ziploc bag around his laptop and it makes headlines?!?!?
But is it orange?
Who cares what color it is? The real question on my mind is: Does it run Linux?
Microsoft announces that Steve Balmer is getting his office redecorated. All the furnishings are to be coated with a new high-tech orange "goo". No reason was given as to why.
Maybe his mate had a bad case of diarrhea?
Trip Hawkins cheers as a typo makes 3DO relevant again for the first time in 15 years.
that it's not OOBLECK? http://www.kinderteacher.com/oobleck.htm
Please don't dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothin' new to say.
Except for Apple's technology is a 3-axis accelerometer on the motherboard, not on the HD.
It's worth noting that many laptops now have "active drive protection" by some name - basically accelerometers detect drops and immediately park the heads of the drive - hopefully before the end of the fall.
fencepost
just a little off
Actually, the pigeons are after the packing foam. They are easily defeated with a cat and a baguette! I believe you want to figure out how to make that game run, if only because it's absolutely amazing... and I am sure there is a relatively simple solution
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
Anyone remember a game called Road Rash for the Sega Genesis?
Having briefly owned a motorcycle, I had to get rid of it until the day where I could buy the crash-proof jumpsuit like the guy on Road Rash had where he could survive even head on collisions with cars.
But now, the world is mine.
It is very simple: By using an initially soft substance, it adsorbs some implulse (shock) while molding to the proper shape to distribute the shear forces over the greatest area. It is like a custom-made bike helmet that forms for the particular impact. The greater and more evenly you distribute the impact, the greater chance all your components will survive.
You can make your own non-Newtonian fluid with corn starch and water. It'll flow through your fingers slowly and when you hit it, the long chain starch molecules interlock making it hard. It was also on Mythbusters. Play with it and see what you think.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Its like that stuff in demolition man!
According to the article it's d3o - not 3do. That was a gaming console.
www.gaiageek.com
Get a (thick?) glove fill with the stuff. Possibly have the external layer contain some inserts... You can now break sticks and stones - and bones - with impunity. The original concept and the name "Karatand" appear in "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner. It seems you can use 3do as an approximation: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1745
It's d3o not 3do according to the website you linked.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Now we need gravity polarizers and transfer booths! Pass on the organ banks, I think.
Thixotropic or pseudoplastic?
I have no idea what this Orange Goo does, and I haven't read TFA. But I want to comment on your comment:
1) Most electronics are not made with incredibly strong surfaces and shells. If you were to encase your electronics in a perfectly fitting thick walled steel cradle, you'd reduce all events (esp a floor hitting a corner) into only the shock (G force) leaving out the impact (concentration of force on the surface of the device) Both of these parts of an impact are damaging. The fundamental momentum-limit you discuss only applies to the shock, which is most likely to damage internal parts.
2) Some crazy materials can do a surprisingly good job of momentarily pretending to be that idealized steel case. I presume the egg-video above shows that.
3) Typical elastic padding will not spread the momentum distribution out EVENLY over the time it takes to decelerate that 1/8". So even the shock part can be improved.
4) Don't forget that in addition to momentum, you must satisfy the conservation of energy equation, too. The most common way to do this is to bounce, and at least some of this energy gets converted to heat in each material that compresses. Dissipating more energy is also valuable.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
"But is it orange?"
Yep, and it's 3 yrs old. Moving on.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
As long as it's not Little, Yellow, Different...
My then new MBP fell from chair back height, as it slipped out of my bag somehow:), landed on one corner, then the next, then flopped on the floor flat. I was sitting in the chair at the time and felt it go, and in my lame rush to save it, I knocked over a glass of water on the table that spilled ice and fluid on the now grounded Mac. My only thought was "well, that's toast, as I picked up the dented and soaking wet laptop. After drying off and saying a few mantras, I hit the power button. It booted right up and has been running fine now for over a year. I conclude that karma is the best protection.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
This stuff has been around for years, in different "stiffnesses" as therapy putty. It's a plasticy clay like amorphous solid that will run over time, but shatter if stuck with sudden force. (just like glass, only runnier) It also produces a little heat on impacts. THe chunks then melt back together.
Had some of the stuff to work my hand muscles after a car accident for recovery. It comes in all sorts of bright colors; usually the color indicates how stiff the material is.
Seems like a clever idea to use it as a shock absorber. One of the drawbacks though is that it becomes softer the hotter it gets.
* Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Fun Ball.
* Caution: Happy Fun Ball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
* Happy Fun Ball contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
* Do not use Happy Fun Ball on concrete.
* Discontinue use of Happy Fun Ball if any of the following occurs:
o itching
o vertigo
o dizziness
o tingling in extremities
o loss of balance or coordination
o slurred speech
o temporary blindness
o profuse sweating
o heart palpitations
* If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
* Happy Fun Ball may stick to certain types of skin.
* When not in use, Happy Fun Ball should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of Happy Fun Ball, Wacky Products Incorporated, and its parent company, Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.
* Ingredients of Happy Fun Ball include an unknown glowing green substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
* Happy Fun Ball has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
* Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
* Happy Fun Ball comes with a lifetime warranty.
Make innocuous-looking gloves out of it. Then you can slug someone on the jaw without breaking your knuckles. Karate-chop any body part without dislocating your hand bones.
100 quatloos says it'll show up as a weapon within 18 months.
The armor may protect you from impacts, and it might even help a little with the deceleration?
But if you hit something hard enough, nothing can protect your internal organs from going *skwish* against your ribcage. Or your brain against your skull, for that matter.
[End Of Line]
AHHAHAHA im so happy mod points are being donated to irrelevant contrived and unfunny "does it run linux jokes" posted by ACs you are all wonderful people stay beautiful
Does it blend?
Louis Wu wore it in Ringworld Engineers.
3d0 is a failed gaming console.
I've got 661 3DO bike pads for knees and elbows. I was skeptical at first that they'd perform better than the hard shell armour I've used before them, but a lot of bike park trips this summer have proven them to be quite field worthy. They're not magic, but considering how flexible they are and the fact they don't feel like they'd provide much protection I'm convinced after a few high speed impacts. I'd love an jacket made of the stuff, too bad it'd probably cost $750+ since knees costs $100.
If it is his future's bright.
Wonderful (and rather hilarious)! --Somebody actually found a use for the stuff. . .
When "Silly Putty" was first invented, they thought, "Oh please! There has GOT to be something this is useful for!" That was fifty years ago, give or take. They tried fitting the solution to every problem they could think of, but it turned out to an overwhelming task. The best they could come up with was to sell it in plastic eggs.
(I got that little history tidbit from the slightly less abridged version which was printed on the reverse side of a piece of cardboard my Silly Putty egg came packaged in).
Looks like somebody finally managed to work how to sell the stuff for real. They just mixed in some orange dye, changed the name and used the word, "Military" in the ad copy. And they're probably charging hella-serious money for the end result, too. Whatever. That's probably how I'd go about it as well.
--And contrary to what somebody pointed out elsewhere, I suspect that this Orange Goo would lose shape and run if left standing. But the goop as these people are selling it is contained in another fabric of some sort, rather like air is to bubble-wrap. --If the keychain sample pictured in the article is anything to go by, that is.
So. . , cute.
You know it's an interesting day when somebody solves a 50 year-old marketing dilemma with orange dye and a some PVC sheets.
-FL
The question I'm now wondering is where to find this material in raw form... From what I'm seeing it's way more efficient than the usual easy-to-find non-newtonian fluids. Would make some great material to use in various DIY situations.
I think I saw this in Popular Mechanics. I could be wrong though.
If anyone's interested in a link to a US patent for this stuff, here it is:
http://www.patentstorm.us/applications/20050037189/fulltext.html
From my brief read, this looks like it's a dilatant sealed inside a foam/gas matrix. The patent refers to Dow Corning catalogue number 3179. The datasheet for that suggests it's a pink compound, not orange:
http://www.dowcorning.com/applications/search/default.aspx?R=7753EN
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Here's a youtube video of this material being demonstrated on a show in Japan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JceDaEMIHKE
It has about the consistency I imagined but the transition to solid happens much more completely than I would have thought.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
It's d3o. Not 3do.