Walking On Water

I emailed Ben to ask him about walking on water - my travel concept - email below :)

Hi Benjamin,

I'm Ashley Betts from Ross Steven's DLF class, I was wanting to see if this was a cool idea and get an expert opinion on it :)

So basically my idea is to use metal foam to create footpaths on water - http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2008/04/ten-futuristic-materials/

That website shows that metal foam is a material of the future but I wanted to make it something more organic - maybe some kind of coral that has the properties of metal foam but is more naturally moving with the surface of the water so like as the surface of the water rises the path rises with it.

What do you think?

Thanks

Ashley

REPLY

Hey Ashley,

The metal foam looks cool. The porous structure is important and often adopted by nature as it is strong and uses less resources.

You could switch the metal for lots of other material types, for example, calcium carbonate crystals like coral which are made up of tiny bricks http://www.uiowa.edu/~cemrf/archive/sem/pages/coral.htm, or a silica polymer (so more 'plastic' like) like diatoms http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&biw=1199&bih=634&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=diatoms&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=

I think that you could make it so it so it rises as the surface of the water rises. As both of the structures that I have mentioned are rigid this is more likely to happen by dissolving and reforming. This is similar to what our bones do. They dissolve and get replenished so it is cyclical.

My first thought (and so by no means correct) would be that you could have a silica polymer, coated in a plastic that let's water in an out, by the dissolved silica is trapped in the plastic. The plastic would float, maybe reshape as the water rises and the silica that is below the surface of the water dissolves and reforms above the surface of the water. Actually the plastic could be made from something like vegetable cell walls, which are water insoluble, and made of sugar which is the material that diatoms use to control the shape of silica growth. ANd then you want to get the porosity in there somewhere...

This is just some initial thoughts, hopefully you can understand what I meant, but at the end of the day totally feasible and don't let my initial thoughts limit your ideas too much.

Let me know if you need me to explain differently.

Cheers,

Benjamin