Carbon Fiber Composite Building Blocks

Bigger and bigger pieces of our cars, bicycles, and airplanes are made of carbon fiber composite rather than metal. But although carbon composites are high-tech materials, they have been used in pretty low-tech ways, mainly as big sheets or tubes. When an aircraft material company approached MIT materials engineer Kenneth Cheung and his lab leader, Neil Gershenfeld, about ways to make better use of these new compounds, they had an idea. Why use big, solid pieces of carbon composite, when it is strong enough to be used in other ways? After experimenting with many different shapes of building blocks they hit on this X-shaped design. These can be made in just about any size, but most of their work has been on pieces about 2 inches (5 cm) across.

By linking these together they can make astonishingly light structures with remarkable strength; an 8-inch (20-cm) cube about as heavy as an egg can bear 650 pounds of weight. That's not enough to be used in high-performance machines, but this is a new technology with great promise. Denser networks of stronger units might one day form airplane wings and many similar objects.