We were able to make the world's lightest material. The entire structure was basically 99.99% air.
[Boeing Short Films]
[LIGHTEST. METAL. EVER]
The microlattice is a 3D open-cellular polymer structure and can often be compared
to something like a bone structure. In your bone structures, the outside of your bone
is very rigid, but on the inside it's actually mostly hollow where you basically have an open-cellular structure
so they aren't easily crushed yet lightweight at the same time.
[Microlattice is one of the strongest and lightest materials known to science.]
If you want to look at just properties in general, then one would be compression
in the sense of energy absorption, and then the second would be lightweight
in terms of having very hollow tubes. So let's say you have the egg drop challenge
that, you know, a lot of students have in school, and they need to drop an egg from 25 stories
and protect that egg. They would probably wrap it in many, many layers of bubble wrap
and then drop it and hope for the best. But what we can do is back design the microlattice
to absorb the force that the egg feels. So instead of having an egg that's wrapped in 3 feet
of bubble wrap, now you have a much smaller package that your egg can sit in.
One of the main applications that we've been looking into is structural components
for aerospace. So when I get on an airplane and I'm leaning against the sidewall panel
and putting my luggage in the stow bin or I'm walking along the floor panels,
I think the microlattice could be used in one of these applications.
In the future, the material can help Boeing to save a lot of weight
to make the airplanes more fuel efficient.
It's really exciting to be able to work with things that we make that can eventually go into a real product
that a lot of users can interact with.