Watch Jay Leno Green Garage Thumbnail Part 2

Jay Leno Green Garage Video Part 2

Passiv Haus Dr Wolfgang Feist Interview Video (Pt 5)

Watch Solar Generation Road Trip 3 Thumbnail

Solar Generation Road Trip 3 of 3 Video

This materials section was created through the support of NanoSonic, a private clean-tech company that researches, designs, develops, manufactures and commercializes innovative materials and products.

Material or Product

Vault Structured Metal

Source

Bionic vault-structuring is a method to generate a three-dimensional pattern in metallic sheets. Thanks to the controlled self-organization arrangement, a minimum of plastic deformation is required for forming the patterns. Because of their high rigidity, vault-structured, hexagonally or three-dimensional facet-structured components can be produced in stainless steel with greatly reduced wall thickness.

Vault-structured materials, even if thin and lightweight, are highly resistant to bending and to stress caused by thermal expansion, and they have other advantageous properties with application potential for lightweight structures. When flow bypasses three-dimensional profiled surfaces, there is a higher convective heat and mass-transfer coefficient compared to smooth surfaces.