I can't believe no one has mentioned this: The researchers claim this material is completely impervious to gasses. Does that mean we've finally got a way to store hydrogen without having it constantly leaking away?
There is no reason to believe that these 2-dimensional polymers are more impervious to gases than metals or glasses or covalent or ionic crystals, all of which have similar inter-atomic distances.
There are lots of coatings and materials that are impermeable to liquids and gases. For starters, they did not say it was inert (like say, PFTE, which is super low energy), so just because it's impermeable doesn't mean it won't get attacked by gases or solvents. Most polymers are.
Just imagine the energy savings!
Like a blimp but with a rigid balloon filled (ha ha) with vacuum instead of a light gas.
The article is saying it's a polymer so I'm guessing it doesn't have the right rigidity, ie, the stronger than steel bit must be with respect to a different strength measure
A helium balloon makes sense, it's lighter than air so it floats, duh.
Well, what's lighter than that? Nothing (vacuum)! It's such a dumb, but correct answer that I had a hard time wrapping my head around it.
Yup, theoretically a vacuum would be extremely buoyant if we could put it in a light enough structure.
And there's the problem.
Containing a gas with pressure equivalent to the outside air requires just a membrane. Storing a vacuum requires a container that can resist external pressure of ~ 14 psi. It scales very badly.
This also creates an insane amount of stored energy in the stress on the shell. Here's a couple of videos of vacuum crushing steel tanker railroad cars [0] [1]. Of course that size doesn't even begin to scale up to the level of vacuum that would be required to buoyancy in the earth's atmosphere.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS6IckF1CM0 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBq5uapC-e0
I'd think the only way to do it might be to have many small hollow spheres contained in a net or something, but the trick would be for each one to be light enough to be positively buoyant...