when?
Armor withstands every strike imaginable without breaking.
Where did you see?
The good national hero Captain America is one of the most popular characters in the comics, films and television series of the comic book publisher Marvel. Not only because of his superhuman strength, but also because of his special armor.
How close are we?
Flip the movies and it turns out that Captain America’s shield was made by clever engineers hired by the US military, and made from an alloy of steel and vibranium.
never heard of it? could be right. “Vibranium” is bogus terms, and the material really doesn’t exist. However, physicists such as physicist James Kacalios, author of Superhero Physics, the theories about how things can “evoke” the energy of blowing – should always be conserved in physics. He speculates in his book that the metal must convert it to infrared light.
Nice idea, but not very useful if you want to build one. Fortunately, the film engineers who developed the shield also have real counterparts.
Take, for example, materials scientist Suveen Mathaudhu (University of California, Riverside), who worked for the US Department of Defense until a few years ago and who styled himself a fanatical superhero. In 2011, before the theatrical release of Captain America: The First AvengerPost a general request for scientific ideas that can make armor body armor a reality.
This led to numerous reactions, which, according to his taste, were at the same time so unusable that he began to work himself. To develop armor that you can also lift without superpowers, Mathude mainly looks at materials with the highest specific strength possible, a quantity that says nothing about just how hard something is to break, but also how appropriate the ratio is between it. weight and strength. Therefore, a high specific force is not only useful for Captain America’s shield, but also for the body of better aircraft or crash helmets.
You make such materials in the lab, among other things, by compressing them together under great pressure. Then the small structures slide closer to each other, after which it is difficult to break. In this way Mathude won a world record. It has made the world’s strongest alloy with magnesium as the main component. However, the most powerful variants developed for this alloy are not much larger than insects.
Will he, or anyone else, succeed in increasing that material to fit the size of the shield, as the engineers in the Hacksmith Industries, who made it their mission to highlight tools such as the lightsaber star Wars Or recreate Thor’s hammer in real life, also an idea of how to recreate one of the most exciting features of the iconic shield.
They showed the recipe in a YouTube video: Attach two powerful electromagnets around your arm, each of which can lift about 650 kilograms. You don’t even have to make your awesome armor super light to make it click on your arm just like in the comics, so – leaps – out of the air.
