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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."
First of, it's 3do (three-dee-oh): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D3o
Sorry, but it's d3o!
14 September 2006
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EBWGbhsuws
Presumably the energy is absorbed by it turning solid. Similar in principle (in vague terms) to how the bonnet of a car (hood to USA people) is designed to crumple so that it absorbs the energy of a crash. Afterwards the bonnet is more condensed - harder - but the energy went into making it so, rather than getting transferred on to the rest of the car and the passengers.
Well the front of normal cars is designed to do that. SUVs are designed to kill people.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
A squishy material just softens the impact by slowing the deceleration of your momentum. The problem is if the impact force is high you need a lot of padding to soften the blow. By turning solid on impact you material instantly distributes all this force over a large area i.e. all the force isn't released on e.g. the corner of your laptop causing it to shatter. This is similar to putting a hard cover around your object (like a motorcycle helmet). The advantage of this material is that is is flexible in it's normal state so it can met integrated in clothing etc without limiting movement.
This video has a great example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JceDaEMIHKE&feature=related
They use a cap with the material to protect a watermelon from impact with a hammer. With a normal squishy material you'd need a really thick layer to soften a blow like that and a hard material would restrict movement.
It's a kind of best of both worlds solution.
It is very similar to silly putty except that it does not "run" when left sitting on a table. The last thing you want your armor to do is pool around your waste.
My guess is they somehow increased the stiffness of it at the low-velocity stage.
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!
Well... we all know what's in this stuff don't we ? It's custard (possibly with some orange food colorant).
The behavior described here is identical to that exhibited by custard and other liquids with low viscosity but high surface tension. The effect is that low velocity impacts are passed through easily but high velocity impact causes the surface tension to rapidly increase and prevents entry. To put it bluntly, you can run over a swimming pool full of custard, but you can't walk over one (brainiac did an episode on it, though they could have done a better job of explaining the theory about why it works that way - wikipedia is your friend here - as per their usual script, they were mostly interested in the fun-value of a swimming pool full of custard... the test subject did indeed run over it until he got to the middle, was told to stop... and then sank).
Now I'm sure it's not actually custard in this goo (well, fairly sure) but the phenomenon is certainly not new and has been known for a while. What seems new is that this is a much lower liquidity and viscosity than most of these substances (it appears to be at the level of clay or playdough rather than a flowing liquid) - which clearly makes for a whole new range of practical applications, since it won't soak into things or leak, you can make things like laptop protective cases lined with the stuff which would be impractical with custard....
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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