[Robotgroup] Cool NASA News - Not transparent aluminum, but transparent steel?

[LHudson]

Hey, has anyone read Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy series?  It's considered a must-read if you're a SW fan but mostly it's full of dialog and syntax that stinks worse than Episode II.  
   
  Anyway, my point is that throughout the novels you will encounter one of the most spine-curdlingly irritating words ever made up and that word is "Transparisteel".  And now some Michigan dork has gone and invented it.  

Ed Xavier Gonzalez <ohlaser at swbell.net> wrote:
  
>
>* Clay Nanosheets and Polymer Create Steel-Strength Plastic
>
>STEEL-STRENGTH PLASTIC
>University of Michigan researchers have created a composite plastic that's as
>strong as steel but lighter and transparent. The composite plastic is made of
>layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble, glue-like polymer. UM 
>engineering
>professor Nicholas Kotov and others have solved a problem that has confounded
>engineers and scientists for decades: individual nano-size building blocks 
>such
>as nanotubes, nanosheets, and nanorods are ultrastrong, but larger materials
>made out of bonded nano-size building blocks were comparatively weak.
>
>The UM researchers created the composite plastic with a robotic machine that
>builds materials one nanoscale layer after another. In this experiment, the
>machine's arm held a piece of glass about the size of a stick of gum on 
>which it
>built the new material. The arm dipped the glass into the glue-like polymer
>solution and then into a liquid that was a dispersion of clay nanosheets. It
>took 300 layers of each of the polymer and the nanosheets to create a piece of
>this material as thick as a piece of plastic wrap.
>
>The polymer used in the experiment, polyvinyl alcohol, was as important as the
>layer-by-layer assembly process. The structure of the "nanoglue" and the clay
>nanosheets allowed the layers to form cooperative hydrogen bonds, causing "the
>Velcro effect." If such bonds are broken, they can easily reform in a new 
>place.
>The composite plastic could be used in microelectromechanical devices,
>microfluids, biomedical sensors and valves, and unmanned aircraft.
>
>Find out more at: http://link.abpi.net/l.php?20071018A2
>
>Copyright (c) 2007 Associated Business Publications Intl.



Ed Xavier Gonzalez
Oak Hill Laser
ohlaser at swbell.net
(512) 288-5243

_______________________________________________
Robotgroup mailing list
Robotgroup at puremagic.com
http://lists.puremagic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/robotgroup



L. Scott Hudson
   
  If I were certain that the World would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree...

 __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com