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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

So it's very light, and it's very elastic. It's also not at all rigid. What would you use it for?

As another top-level comment mentioned, depending on the sheer strength, it could be used in composite structures.

Take a 2'x2' 1" thick piece of foam. Laminate some fiberglass onto both sides of it. This is basically how modern boat hulls are constructed. Extremely light, rigid, insulated and durable.

WAG, but if it would allow you to replace 1 ton of foam on a 40' yacht, that's one ton of extra cargo/amenities you could carry instead and maintain the same water line. Or alternatively you could produce a faster boat with less wetted area.

I'm sure a real engineer has a better idea of practical applications. But I like cruising yachts so. :-)

1 ton of foam? Foam used in boating is usually in the 2-4lb range, which means 2-4lb per cubic foot. There's not much chance a 40' yacht has 1000 cubic ft of foam in it - far more likely it's got 20-30 cu ft, which is under 100lbs of foam. Not enough to move the needle a bit.

Plus, foam provides displacement in case of breaches as a matter of it's nature. This lattice wouldn't provide any displacement, so a small breach would mean you're 2" thick composite hull would fill with water, which would be bad.

Just by looking at it, I doubt there is enough shear strength to make it a useful sandwich panel web. Then again, I've been wrong before. But metallic/composite honeycomb is pretty well optimized stuff as it is.

A bicycle helmet made out of this material sounds perfect to me. Good protection, light weight, and great ventilation.

Doesn't seem a good protection against your head hitting a sharp edge - due to its elasticity.

Well you'd still pair it with a shell.

Even so, I don't see how this could replace the foam in a conventional helmet. It seems like it has its strength in its elasticity, but not much else. The video did a poor job at explaining good applications.

Wings. One fairly recent experimental plane [1] used aeroelasticity to control a plane instead of the normal surfaces. A wing made out of a material that can flex and bend would be able to much better take advantage of this effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-53_Active_Aeroelastic...

Crash helmets? (a layer inside, not the whole thing, obviously..)

Beds. I can imagine this would be awesome as a bedspring. Or on planes, seats.

yeah from the way it compress and bends I's hard to see how it's going to replace structural elements as the video implies.

maybe fuel tanks shells? having the tank collapse as it's used instead of being filled with vapors would also reduce flammability in general.

Motorcycle fairings

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