Don’t raise unruly people in extreme cold weather

Chapter 389 Research Directions of New Materials
In order to make a material light enough and strong enough at the same time, in addition to working on the performance of the material itself, you can also adjust the structure of the material.

In this regard, the skeleton of flying birds is a good reference.

In order to fly, birds have almost reached the extreme in evolution, with their streamlined body shape, feather arrangement, and even muscles, internal organs and bones, all of which have been specially specialized.

For example, the inside of bird bones is as hollow as possible, yet has a supporting structure, allowing the entire bone to be light enough while also having sufficient strength.

In the original world, humans learned this technology through studying birds and applied it to the manufacture of aircraft.

In addition to applying this technology to the overall structural design of aircraft, humans have also developed a new type of material called foam metal based on this principle.

This material not only has higher strength than ordinary metal materials, but also has lighter weight, which can be said to be a qualitative difference in performance.

Taking the most common foam aluminum as an example, its density is only 0.1 to 0.4 times that of metallic aluminum, but its bending resistance is 1.5 times that of ordinary steel, which can be said to be excellent.

For Perfect, it is a very simple thing to make foam aluminum. She can even make the high-performance aluminum alloy used in the aerospace industry in the world.

But for Perfect, the challenge of this kind of thing is too low, or she hardly needs to spend time to study it to make what she wants.

So she decided to develop a fantasy material that would be even denser and lighter than aluminum foam.

In nature, aluminum is already a light metal and its density is very low. Foamed aluminum is the best among them, but there is still a qualitative gap between it and the material that Perfectoct wants to obtain.

But this is normal. If Perfect was only satisfied with the performance of foam aluminum, then she was just using fantasy alchemy to make up for the technological gap of less than two hundred years, and it cannot be said that she has brought out the true performance of fantasy alchemy.

And another point is that in this era, large-scale production of aluminum is still not an easy task, and the price of this thing is still very expensive.

What really caused the price of aluminum to fall from being comparable to gold to being less than copper and iron was mainly the discovery of electrolytic aluminum technology and the popularization of electrification during the Second Industrial Revolution.

Before this, humans had limited means to obtain aluminum, so things like Napoleon using an aluminum cup and generals' medals being made of aluminum happened, which sounds quite outrageous.

For an alchemist who masters the alchemy of fantasy, it is actually not difficult to create a material lighter than foam aluminum.

Even if Perfecto wanted to, she could create metals that were lighter than air.

Of course, to make such an incredible thing, even Perfect would have to spend a lot of time and energy, and the cost would be explosive.

Therefore, Perfect did not choose an overly radical R&D strategy. Instead, after comprehensively considering the current situation and its own needs, it set a standard for itself that was not too high.

The density of the new material's metal element must be only 0.1 times that of metallic aluminum, while its bending stiffness must be more than twice that of high-carbon steel.

This is not a particularly outrageous request, as such materials even exist in the original world.

For example, carbon fiber is said to have been hyped up to the sky and even somewhat demonized.

Its density is only 1.5-1.8 grams per cubic centimeter, which is 1500 to 1800 kilograms per cubic meter, just for aluminum alloy.

Coupled with its superior performance and material strength, it has been greatly sought after and applied in various fields. For Perfect, this material is a goal worth challenging.

Of course, she needed metal, not carbon fiber.

The most critical reason why carbon fiber is not used is that carbon fiber itself is fiber, not metal material.

Although it has a wide range of applications, it is not simple to process and use. For example, common carbon fiber requires special viscose as base glue and impregnating glue in processing, so that individual fibers can be bonded together to form carbon fiber materials.

For Perfect, this undoubtedly greatly increases the trouble of use.

She could accept making it into foam metal. After all, it only needed to be processed into the initial plate, and the rest would be the work of engineers and construction workers.

But for carbon fiber, she has to master the entire set of manufacturing and processing technology.

This seemed a bit too troublesome to Perfect.

So she finally chose to use carbon as the base material, and on this basis, use carbon fiber as a template to develop a fantasy material that can achieve the performance of carbon fiber materials.

The main reason for choosing carbon is that it has stable properties. Unlike sodium and magnesium in light metals, it is very active and can easily react with other elements.

This is also the reason why, among light metals, sodium and magnesium are lighter than aluminum, but are not widely used in the field of materials.

So Perfect decisively abandoned these light metals and chose carbon, a seemingly inconspicuous element, as the basis for his research on new materials.

After all, carbon is stable enough, and it can form a variety of atomic and molecular structures that exhibit very different properties and performance.

For example, the famous carbon 60 is sixty carbon atoms combined in a spherical structure, which has an atomic structure with only half the density of aluminum but is very stable.

Not only that, carbon 60 itself has special chemical activity and can undergo addition reactions to produce various derivatives.

So the target that Perfectcot is aiming at is actually carbon 60, but she needs to use fantasy alchemy to make this material, and what she obtains is a metal element with more stable properties, rather than a carbon molecule with a special structure.

If all they wanted was carbon 60, Perfect could have done it with technology, and there would be no need to resort to fantasy alchemy.

After all, Perfecto's goal was to open the Jade Record, not to study a certain material.

The research on materials was just incidental. She just didn't want to waste her precious time and a research topic and wanted to make a fantasy material with practical value.

This may be difficult for ordinary alchemists, but for Perfectoct, it is relatively easy to achieve.

At least before she encountered difficulties and setbacks, Perfect felt that it was not difficult, especially when she had the two great artifacts, the Philosopher's Stone and Fantasy Alchemy, everything was really simple.

(End of this chapter)