Pembroke Fellow Leads in Engineering Breakthrough

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have engineered a metallic wood with nanoscale pores that make it as strong as titanium, but four-to-five times lighter.

Pembroke Fellow Professor Vikram Deshpande was one of the leaders of the study, along with James Pikul at Penn Engineering, and Bill King and Paul Braun at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Taking an architectural approach to materials research allows researchers to design structures without defects in their atomic arrangement that limit their strength - a flaw present in titanium. In this study the researchers were inspired by the natural world, and call their material a metallic wood because of its cellular similarities to natural wood. They've successfully created foils of metallic wood around 1 square centimeter in size. The next challenge is replicating the process at larger scales, to allow for greater testing of its tensile properties and potential commercial production. 

Read more about the study here.

Photo credit: University of Pennsylvania