Next, Schaedler and his colleagues etched away the photopolymer with lye, leaving behind a lattice of hollow nickel-phosphorus struts each 100- to 500-microns wide, or one-to-five times the width of a human hair. The walls of these tubes ranged from 100 to 500 nanometers or billionths of a meter thick, or up to 1,000 times thinner
true religion outlet than a human hair. These lattices are even airier than aerogels, with a density of 0.9 mg per cubic centimeter, "The lattice is 99.99 percent open volume," Schaedler said. "It's about 200 times lighter than Styrofoam." In experiments, these metal lattices proved very springy, bouncing
true religion jeans outlet back to their original shape even after being compressed to less than half their size. "We're envisioning applications in structural components, such as in aerospace," Schaedler said. "Its energy-absorption capabilities might also make it useful for acoustic-, vibration- and shock-damping. We can control the architecture on the millimeter, micrometer and nanometer scales, to design materials with tailored properties for specific applications, if we want."