100x lighter than styrofoam. I wonder what % of weight the styrofoam blank is on an average board.
www.smh.com.au/technology/scientists-invent-lightest-material-on-earth-what-now-20111118-1nmok.html
^Cool.
EPS cores are normally 14kg per cubic metre. So a 100L board would have a core that weighed about 1.4kg minus the volume of the laminate.
11kg/m3 blanks are about as light as you can get I think.
Splitting hairs but they haven't invented the "lightest material on earth". The material is nickel but it is arranged in such a manner that there is lots of air. They have invented a way of using an existing material.
I was all excited thinking they had a new polymer (ie new compound) like a foam that was reasonable cost and we could all use, rather they are just doing trick stuff with existing materials
Not certain, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't have the tensile properties needed to make a board core? Would it 'spring back' from compression & flex?
As Mark mentioned, the 'lightweight' element is air. This goes for styrofoam & most 'lightweight' materials with possible uses for board blanks...now if they could manufacture a composite carbon core using the same principles, that would be impressive & worth researching further!
That was my first thought, "can they build a windsurfer from it"? One can only dream.
I am guessing the people asking for lighter boards wouldn't be the same complaining that their wave boards break to easily. Just saying...
yeah but if a board was super light, like 1.5 Kg, would it work at all ?
Or would it just be uncontrollable and blow away with any gusts ?
I think we are over analysing the impact of new gear.
I, and many others, have seen the great footage of the Gerroa wavesailing comp two weekends ago.
But a few years ago, I was given some footage of Josh Adams wavesailing at Esperance in the late Eighties (film was called "Summers a Breeze") when Josh was around 18 years old.
The gear he was sailing on would make today's sailors cringe. One piece SDM, fibreglass waveboard, mylar sail with a few leech battens. But his sailing was amazing, even compared to some of the best moves by the best sailors at Gerroa on that weekend
All of todays' gear is designed to a level way beyond that of what most sailors utilise. It's a "mind over matter" game, and breaking through that crucial barrier
is the great hurdle of this sport.
Cheers
rather it is a useful rearrangement of a material
and likewise it is a useful rearrangement of an existing material
Maybe boards don't need to have an EPS blank, maybe they could bring this technology back:
www.airinside.ch/uk_boards.htm
From the makers/designer/scientists paper..
"Ultralight (<10 milligrams per cubic centimeter) cellular materials are desirable for thermal insulation; battery electrodes; catalyst supports; and acoustic, vibration, or shock energy damping. We present ultralight materials based on periodic hollow-tube microlattices. These materials are fabricated by starting with a template formed by self-propagating photopolymer waveguide prototyping, coating the template by electroless nickel plating, and subsequently etching away the template. The resulting metallic microlattices exhibit densities ρ ≥ 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter, complete recovery after compression exceeding 50% strain, and energy absorption similar to elastomers. Young's modulus E scales with density as E ~ ρ2, in contrast to the E ~ ρ3 scaling observed for ultralight aerogels and carbon nanotube foams with stochastic architecture. We attribute these properties to structural hierarchy at the nanometer, micrometer, and millimeter scales."
