New Magnesium-Alloy Foam From NYU's Nikhil Gupta Floats On Water

Jason Koebler writes: A new class of magnesium-alloy syntactic foam, which is made out of hollow particles to lower its weight and density is one of the strongest metals for its weight and density ever developed, which makes it ideal for use in boats. Developed by Nikhil Gupta at NYU Polytechnic University, the alloy is 44 percent stronger than similar, aluminum-based foams, and each individual sphere within the foam can withstand pressure of more than 25,000 pounds per square inch before breaking, which is roughly 100 times the pressure exerted by water coming out of a firehose. Gupta's foams are currently used by the Navy and he suspects this one will be ready for use in warships within three years.

Comments

Re:Navy? Warships?

[gstoddart]

Surprisingly, these materials aren't all that expensive, according to Gupta--the raw materials are common, and there are many factories that make syntactic foams. The difficulty is in the basic science of creating them and evaluating their properties. Gupta's lab has all sorts of machines to bend, twist, compress, pull, and otherwise stress-test a material.

"If there's a way to break something, we can do it here," he told me.

From the sounds of it, this aint his first rodeo, and has already thought of this stuff.

Maybe, just maybe, the man isn't an idiot?

Re:Navy? Warships?

[OzPeter]

ANd what are its other durability properties, like brittleness/flexibility/fracture toughness? . Ability to withstand piercing? Just because it can withstand tensile or compressive stress doesn't make it a good solution for ships.

Given that TFA says that the Navy is using this foam for the deck of the USS Zumwalt, I'm betting that they have already thought up and answered more questions that the average slashdotter could have envisaged - and that they are happy with all of the answers.