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Old 10-10-2019, 05:33 PM   #56 (permalink)
freebeard
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Stop the presses, we'll need to rethink everything from batteries to heat exchangers based on this: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-schwar...fullerene.html

Quote:
The discovery of buckyballs surprised and delighted chemists in the 1980s, nanotubes jazzed physicists in the 1990s, and graphene charged up materials scientists in the 2000s, but one nanoscale carbon structure—a negatively curved surface called a schwarzite—has eluded everyone. Until now.
[snip]
The new structures were built inside the pores of zeolites, crystalline forms of silicon dioxide—sand—more commonly used as water softeners in laundry detergents and to catalytically crack petroleum into gasoline. Called zeolite-templated carbons (ZTC), the structures were being investigated for possible interesting properties, though the creators were unaware of their identity as schwarzites, which theoretical chemists have worked on for decades.
This structure divides any arbitrary volume into two with a minimal* surface area separating them. On the macroscale an air-to-air heat exchanger could be 3D printed from copper or even an thin insulator like paper.

Exhaust air to intake air or vice versa.

*Then again, maybe I meant maximal. A flat plane would be minimal.
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Last edited by freebeard; 10-10-2019 at 05:54 PM..
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