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MIT Unveils New Material That's Strongest and Lightest On Earth (futurism.com)
A team of MIT researchers have created the world's strongest and lightest material known to man using graphene. Futurism reports: Graphene, which was heretofore, the strongest material known to man, is made from an extremely thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged in two dimensions. But there's one drawback: while notable for its thinness and unique electrical properties, it's very difficult to create useful, three-dimensional materials out of graphene. Now, a team of MIT researchers discovered that taking small flakes of graphene and fusing them following a mesh-like structure not only retains the material's strength, but the graphene also remains porous. Based on experiments conducted on 3D printed models, researchers have determined that this new material, with its distinct geometry, is actually stronger than graphene -- making it 10 times stronger than steel, with only five percent of its density. The discovery of a material that is extremely strong but exceptionally lightweight will have numerous applications. As MIT reports: "The new findings show that the crucial aspect of the new 3-D forms has more to do with their unusual geometrical configuration than with the material itself, which suggests that similar strong, lightweight materials could be made from a variety of materials by creating similar geometric features."
Claiming it can replace steel means it has not only better tensile strength, but also compressive strength, low brittleness, and similar ductility and hardness.
Glass is stronger than steel, in one direction only. It's not used in structural engineering though. Steel is just so versatile that so far not any material has matched it.
But, impressive research and I hope they keep going with it.
According the the article they only have a theoretical model for the material and the claim that it is the strongest material known seems to be based solely 3D printed models agreeing with a computational model of the material. This is no grounds whatsoever to claim that this is the "worlds strongest material". It's a promising start which might lead to that but until you have actually built the material and measured its properties you cannot claim the discovery.
We did not claim the Higgs discovery in the 1960s based on Higgs' theory we needed to wait until there was experimental evidence showing it was correct. The same applies here: there is no guarantee that some effect they have not modelled is important and means the material does not behave as they expect it to. A macroscopic plastic model is not guaranteed to behave the same due to the larger quantum mechanical effects at smaller scales. In fact so far they do not even know yet whether it is possible to build the material - so lets cut the hype and have them make their claim when they actually have the material in hand and confirmed it really does perform as they predict.
Spectacularly wrong. Carbon fiber is about as brittle as china. It has very little toughness.
It's a bit depressing to see this volley continue back and forth with no one mentioning the fact that the "carbon fiber" you're referring to is... plastic. Plastic with carbon fibers added to strengthen it, just like fiberglass refers to plastic with glass fibers added to strengthen it.
From this, there are two key points to make in this debate that so far haven't been made:
1. The properties of carbon fiber depend largely on the properties of the material its being added to. There are a wide variety of polymers out there and, in principle, you could probably put it in concrete, or maybe even a cold-forged metal.
2. The parallels between carbon fiber and whatever this new material is are inconsequential if the new material is something that can be used directly and not as an additive.
The article is shockingly unhelpful in clarifying this second point, and it even cryptically adds that the geometrical techniques here could be used directly with non-carbon materials, which doesn't make a lot of sense given the unique molecular geometric properties of graphene (clearly show in illustrations in the article) are dependent on the chemical properties of carbon.