So this is just saying that the shape of a material determines its strength? From what I gathered from the video, they didn't actually use graphene in these objects.<p>I was reading a introductory book on metallurgy over the holidays and realized that I had no idea what "stretching" was. I still hardly have any idea, but from what I was able to gather from the book, in steel at least, when stretched, there are these molecular "fault-lines" that can shift and still stay stable without actually breaking. Apparently, steel can be put under stress to fall to this final state to avoid further shifting during use in machines and whatnot.<p>Maybe I'm completely missing the point and the plastic is somehow stronger than steel, but the quote<p>>"You can replace the material itself with anything," MIT's head of Civil and Environmental Engineering said. "The geometry is the dominant factor."<p>makes me think that this is the case?
The original journal article is open access [0], and I think it's pretty well-written and accessible.<p>This is a really great example of theory-driven materials design.<p>[0]: <a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1601536.full" rel="nofollow">http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1601536.full</a>
(ten times stronger than <i>mild</i> steel, at 2.7 GPa tensile yield.) Nobody is deciding between mild steel and graphene. Comparing to PAN carbon fiber (which can achieve 7.0 GPa yield with careful manufacture) would be more useful.
<i>> MIT says that this is because the thinner walls allow the structure to deform gradually while the thicker one stores the deformation energy, which releases all at once</i><p>I'm not sure that's the failure mode I want load-bearing things to have...
I don't know if the writer really understood what's going on there. Those models are just plastic. Understanding how to make strong shapes is useful for eventually building real structures with graphene in the future, but nothing about that research used graphene.<p>I think they're saying that if that plastic model was graphene then it would be 5% as dense and 10x as strong as steel...but no such thing was actually created. The title here is pretty click baity.