Researchers Create 'Super Black' Material (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Researchers Create 'Super Black' Material (2014)

designntrend.com

13 pointsevo_912 comments

It should be called 'fuligin,' in honor of Gene Wolfe.

"I put on the cloak... the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned, showing only a featureless dark."

From The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1980

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1495

2014. You can get some info from the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

Most interesting being the layman explanation: "Vantablack is composed of a forest of vertical tubes which are "grown". When light strikes vantablack, instead of bouncing off, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected among the tubes, eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat."

I'd love to see someone walking around in a bodysuit made out of this stuff (although I have no idea if it's flexible enough).

This site got the name wrong. It's called 'vantablack'. It's also not 'ten times stronger than steel' in the traditional sense, given that it's typical use is going to be as a coating rather than a structural material. A microthin layer of vantablack may have greater tensile strength than a microthin layer of steel, but building girders of the stuff is infeasible.

Well if you scroll down to the comments section you'll see the quality of readership that site draws in.

Now that is really bad for the eyes! It’s just so... black! You can hardly even make out its shape. Light just falls right into it.

</obligatory>

I'll see your Douglas Adams and raise you "None, none more black!"

I want to paint doors with this stuff. Especially red ones.

Not only is the material "super black" it:

> conducts heat seven and half times more effectively than copper, and the material is ten times stronger than steel.

Both of features are very useful. Heatsinks, spacecraft... all sorts of awesome uses.

The thermal conductivity is just because it's carbon, you can use other forms of carbon like diamond which also have about 10 times the thermal conductivity of copper.

Diamond is used sometimes in thermal pastes and adhesives one of its disadvantages however is that it's quite abrasive so it cannot be used on naked silicon dies or in applications that require thermal grease and are hence under stress, I would suspect that other nanoforms of carbon are more or less just as abrasive as diamond so they would have similar restrictions.

I don't think graphite is abrasive.

Graphite also doesn't have that good of thermal conductivity it's actually worse than copper in most cases.

[2014]

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