materiO’

Commissioned by Hyundai, the architect Asif Khan have built the blackest building in the world to celebrate the Olympic Winter Games that took place in Pyeong Chang, in South Korea. The Vantablack, the darkest matter in the world, strikes again! Thanks to its millions of extra-fine and vertically ultra-squeezed nanotubes,, it traps almost all the particles of light that venture into this "forest", and transforms them into heat. The method of producing these nanotubes is a bit complicated, because it requires "growing" them in the laboratory: so difficult to paint an entire building with it! That's why the company that produces Vantablack has created VBx2, a commercial version in aerosol that does not require the use of these nanotubes. "Less" powerful, it absorbs "only" 99% of visible light while the original Vantablack absorbs 99.96%. It is nevertheless impressive to see this structure create a hole of perspective in the landscape, punctuated by thousands of white lights that simulate the appearance of a constellation. The interior is in total contrast with the exterior, but linked with the great hydrophobic properties of the Vantablack: Khan designed a vast "water room" - a multi-sensory hydrophobic installation that emits 25,000 droplets of water every minute, punctuated by the visitor's interaction with a series of haptic sensors that order movements to these droplet flows : They gather, grow and accumulate in a "lake" that drains and reappears within minutes.

Everybody knows about origami, this impressive skill of folding a piece of paper, generally resulting in amazingly complex figures. You won’t be surprised to know that nature masters this art, and has been mastering it for probably much longer than humans. The earwig’s wing is the perfect illustration. This is where art, biology and engineering meet. Researchers from the ETH Zürich and the Purdue University combined their skills to develop a bio-inspired spring origami, drawing their inspiration from the unusual folding system of the earwig’s wing. The work showed that the insect’s wing doesn’t respect one of the mathematical aspect of origamis (the angular sum should be equal to 360˚). This allows them to have an area during the flight 10 to 18 times larger than when the wings are retracted, and they remain open by a bistable locking mechanism during flight and self-fold rapidly with no muscular actuation. Weird right? This arises from the material from which the joints on the wing are made: an elastic biopolymer called resilin which works as an extensional and rotational springs so that the wings can fold in an elastic way. Using the results obtained and a 3D printer, the researchers succeeded to make a prototype able to act juste like the earwig’s wing. 

Just for once, we have created a ID card on a material that will be marketed in 2024, under the reference M0781. An aluminum whose production no longer generates greenhouse gases, but only oxygen. Of course, matériO is generally abstraining from activating sheets on a material until it is not available; because why make you dream about incredible things which you cannot use for your projects? But two reasons induced us to infringe this rule; first of all the fact that we are probably facing a real revolution in aluminium production, comparable to what happened in the 1950s' with the emergence of float glass production. And also because it can be interesting to integrate this innovation for your long-term projects.So, keep posted ...