Nanoscience #4 Building Ultra-light weight Aircrafts

Hey steemians,

Today in the series of nanoscience articles, I am going to share something very interesting and of great applicability. You must have notice as the science is growing, materials are gaining the properties whether in durability or stiffness any many more (basically the material science is evolving). One of the example today I am going share with you guys is the ultra-light weight materials, and where they got inspired from.

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If you look deep into the nature, you will find all the answers, as from my previous posts from the nanoscience series, I have been sharing the nanotechnology derived from nature only and how nature have dealt with it.

One of the beautiful creature is toucan, distributed in South America and they do not migrate. So, what’s interesting in this bird which attracts the scientists? It’s the colorful and large toucan beak, which in some species measures more than half of the length of the body. Despite of being large size it is very light and being composed of bone struts (tissues of keratin), which makes it very tough.

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The exterior of the toucan beak is made up of overlapping nanosized tiles of keratin, same protein that makes up hair and fingernails. And these keratin layers comprised of superposed hexagonal scales glued together. If you see microscopic images, you can find there are the layers and they are arranged to give a hollow structure. The keratin protein makes it tougher and the nanoscopic hollow structures gives it the ultra-light weight.

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Researchers have discovered that the large beaks of toucan is highly efficient in thermoregulatory system, though its size may still be advantageous in other way, will be discussing on it may be some other time.

So, these keratin layered structures give it the tensile strength of around 50 MPa and Young’s Modulus of 1.4 GPa (MPa- Mega Pascal, GPa- Giga Pascal). The interior of the beak is a rigid foam of a network of nanosized bony fibers connected by membranes. This allows the beak to absorb high energy impacts (Y. Seki, M. S. Schneider, M. A. Meyers, Acta Materialia 53 (2005) 5281–5296).

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"The nanostructured toucan beaks inspires automotive panels that could protect passengers in crashes and inspires the construction of ultra-light aircraft component".

The aircraft components like the wings and the cabins can be mede out of this technology, and it can also be used in certain different area to help the human kind. Nautre itself has lots of nanostructured materials which inspires us make a better world.