Chemists from Utah State University, USA and Southern Federal University, Russia, computationally designed a new, metastable, ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum. Credit: Iliya Getmanskii, Southern Federal University, Russia
Scientists computationally design new metastable, ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum using density functional calculations with imposing periodic boundary conditions. If you drop an aluminum spoon in a sink full of water, the spoon will sink to the bottom. That’s because aluminum, in its conventional form, is denser than water says Utah State University chemist Alexander Boldyrev.
But if you restructure the common household metal at the molecular level, as Boldyrev and colleagues did using computational modeling, you could produce an ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum that’s lighter than water. “My colleagues’ approach to this challenge was very innovative,” says Boldyrev, professor in USU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “They started with a known crystal lattice, in this case, a diamond, and substituted every carbon atom with an aluminum tetrahedron.”
To their amazement, it has a density of only 0.61 gram per cubic centimeter, in contrast to convention aluminum’s density of 2.7 grams per cubic centimeter. “That means the new crystallized form will float on water, which has a density of one gram per cubic centimeter,” Boldyrev says.
Such a property opens a whole new realm of possible applications for the non-magnetic, corrosive-resistant, abundant, relatively inexpensive and easy-to-produce metal. “Spaceflight, medicine, wiring and more lightweight, more fuel-efficient automotive parts are some applications that come to mind,” Boldyrev says. “Of course, it’s very early to speculate about how this material could be used. There are many unknowns. For one thing, we don’t know anything about its strength.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/usu-uau092117.php
Recent Comments