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Graphene Aerogel Takes World's Lightest Material Crown
cylonlover writes "Not even a year after it claimed the title of the world's lightest material, aerographite has been knocked off its crown by a new aerogel made from graphene. Created by a research team from China's Zhejiang University in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering lab headed by Professor Gao Chao, the ultra-light aerogel has a density of just 0.16 mg/cm3, which is lower than that of helium and just twice that of hydrogen."
Make a bag around it. Remove the air. We have an airship with the lift somewhere between H and He.
So how strong is the aerogel? How big a bag can we make and have it support atmospheric pressure on the other side? That will really determine the lift efficiency.
Obviously not 'lightest', but 'least dense'. Sheesh, editors - do your JOB! The /. title should be "Silly folk at Gizmag confuse mass with density when describing world's least dense solid.'
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The insulative properties are also pretty dramatic. There is another picture floating around with some crayons in place of the flower. That little stunt might not work as well with carbon aerogels as it does with silica ones, though...
The density is measured including its interior space. In reality the interior space is filled with air and its realtive weight is the carbon structure alone.
To make it float you would have to find a way to seal off the interior structure and remove the air from that.
Graphene Aerogel Takes World's Lightest Material Crown
A crown should weigh heavy on a ruler's brow, lest he forget the weight of his responsibility.
What makes this so different from, say, creating a hollow cube with some very fine polymer for the vertices, with the faces and interior remaining empty? If something's full of holes, is its density still measurable in a meaningful way? A battleship is less dense than water in this sense, but the material it's made from isn't.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
OTOH, how strong is it? Graphene is supposed to be tough stuff.
I have no idea how strong graphene areogel is, but I have handled silica aerogel and it is extremely fragile. It it difficult to handle it without accidentally fracturing it. My daughter used a disk of aerogel as in insulator in her school science project last year, and we had to buy three disks ($30 each) because they kept breaking. I hope graphene aerogel is stonger.