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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?
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.
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMmhNbj4K68
The protection has less to do with absorption reduction than a distribution of force.
Did you see the video someone else posted of the stuff turned into a fabric? Looks even better than that. The guy is wearing a sweater and gets someone to whack him on the elbow with a snow shovel. Then they put a toque made of the stuff on a watermelon and hit it with a hammer.
No need to just do the "bony extremeties."
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
Actually, Lin Yutang accused us of it quite eloquently ;)
Which is why you should look at the Bagger 288 instead.
Then mentally transport it, and tear down the little contemptible hill.