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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?
Looks like the dyslexia is contagious today.
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
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.
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
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
Lexdysia you mean!
"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 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!
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 ?
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.
Misinformation is still information, after all.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
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.
I put the sex in dyslexia!
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
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