EX-Z3
ƒ/2.6
5.8 mm
1/40
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
15 responses to “What’s That? (45)”
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It looks like a metal that, while molten, was combined with some other stuff (water?) that produced bubbles, probably from violent evaporation caused by heat, and gave metal the porous consistence. Lead? Aluminium?
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Yes! Omnivorous nanites. no.
Bingo MaximoBenO. It is a block of aluminum foam that I saw during the IDEO tour.
Here is a description from Inventibles (the place to go to get a block to play with):
“Metal foams are considered by some to be an emerging class of new materials.
It can be used to add strength, energy absorption, stability, vibration suppression, and sound and temperature insulation. It is a great material to be used as a filler, for example, in a door or hollow tube or sandwiched between panes of glass, for example in a table top.
As an energy absorbing material it is unique that it absorbs energy equally well from all directions.
It is 10% aluminum manufactured by bubbling molten aluminum. Additives cause a foam to form at the top of the molten metal; this foam is then drawn through rollers to form sheets.”
I also have some carbon foam from ORNL, but it is not as photogenic. It has the spooky property of high thermal conductivity for a lightweight foam. When lifting a low density material like a cotton ball, our minds naturally predict that it will feel like an insulator, and not particularly cold or hot. These foams are cold, like picking up a metal block that quickly warms up to body temperature. It’s even stranger if you put a piece of ice on it. You can feel the temperature of the ice almost instantly, passed through the carbon block.
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Steve, there’s a funny relation to one of your other posts. You said Gordon Moore used to make his fishing weights pouring molten lead into Campbell’s soup cans. I used to do that too, and sometimes, just for fun, I poured the lead in a larger can filled with water. The lead mixed with water, evaporated some of it making the bubble effect, and hardened, all in less than a second. The result was a spongy ball of lead looking pretty much like this one in your picture (the surface was highly irregular and abrassive, though). That’s the kind of odd experiment that make you curious, I guess.
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Good stuff! I like the light foam good conduction observation. Would indeed be counter intuitive to have something that big be both light and heat conductive.
Is the carbon foam made some different way? I thought it was pretty tough to make liquid carbon. Oh, and on the topic of carbon, have you heard of being able to electrolize C02 into C and 02?
The foam has been up and coming for at least the past 3 or 4 years now… Probably production costs are tempering it’s popularity?
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"It has the spooky property of high thermal conductivity for a lightweight foam."
The biomimicry principle applied here too, right? The material looked like neural wiring to me… and below you mention this high performance as thermal conductors…
Even with my short mind, I can see a niche here for a wonderful discussion about resemblences.
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This reminds me of a coworker who, at the surplus store where we worked, made it his goal to blow out, at least once, every electrical socket in the place. (It was a warehouse-sized place, so he had his work cut out for him.) He did this with our "suicide cords," a standard electrical cord with plug on one end and alligator clips on the other (for testing appliances with bad cords). He’d connect the clips with a length of plain solder, and plug it in. Sometimes the solder would just melt at one point, but sometimes the whole thing would liquify and drop do the counter and splatter a little before hardening. The visual texture was quite similar.
(Yes, he got fired in due course, but before that we learned to keep our mugs away from the sockets in the kitchen, else they became covered with burns and drops of metal. He was later arrested and expelled for blowing up toilets at his local community college.)
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fantastic. Any idea of how it compares to that transparent solid foam that was shown around a few months ago?
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Looks like Aluminum Foam (aka Metal Foam)
See wikipedia – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_foam
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