A Solid Lighter than Air

Maybe when you hear lighter than air, the first thing that comes to mind would be a Zeppelin or an Aerogel. Well, a Zeppelin is lighter than air when the gas inside has a lower density and is trapped in a flexible membrane. The Zeppelin is not a solid.

Aerogel is one example of a porous solid that goes to the limits of density by being cellular with minimum solid material. It is 99% air and thus is it still heavier than air.

A solid that is lighter than air, by my definition is a non fluid material that has a density lower that air density on earth's surface which is about 1200 grams per meter cube.

So how is this solid achievable ?

I guess you have heard of Graphene, the lately famous super strong material, that got Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov a noble prize in Physics in 2010. I will use this strong material to describe a solid lighter than air that can be first made in laboratory and maybe in the future produced in large scale for projects of aviation, space or construction.

Graphene is described as "atomic-scale hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms" shown in the picture below. A one atom layer material.

Wikipedia

When you look a round you, remember that every meter cube of air has about 1200 grams of O2 , CO2, N2 and other gas molecules floating it. So, let us take one meter cube of air, push all atoms in it to the surface of that cube and connect them to form a wall. We end up with a solid cube with a vacuum within it. This cube has 1200g of material making its surface shell and a vacuum inside, so it has the same density of Air (Even same atoms).

We could do the same thought exercise but replace this time the Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen atoms with  only Carbon. Then, we connect the Carbon atoms to form a Graphene solid cube of carbon with a vacuum "trapped" inside. Graphene is measured to be one of the strongest materials discovered so far, the common story to describe the strength of it, is that if you place a pen on a sheet of Graphene and make an elephant stand on the pen, it will not pierce the sheet.

A meter cube volume for a real Experiment is definitely not a practical starting volume for a laboratory. The real experiment could be done to produce a 1 cm diameter sphere of graphene in Vacuum. This sphere would trap vacuum, resist collapsing and when placed in Air Environment, it would be lighter than air.

I went through the trouble of doing calculations for the smallest sphere with a shell that would be lighter than air considering the volume is takes, in other words that smallest sphere that can be lighter than air. The result is :

1.90121 µm radius or 3.80242 µm diameter.

If you are into physics and math... continue reading.

Below are my approximate calculations, please correct me if you spot a mistake.

Assuming that carbon atoms form perfect flat Hexagone geometry, the area of an hexagon with L as edge length is :

Distance between carbon atoms in a Hexagone assembly is 0.142 nm.
Area of a sphere is 4πR^2.
Dividing those two values with a selected starting radius of 1 meter, we could identify how many hexagons would cover the surface of that sphere.

When assembled, every hexagon shares a side with another hexagon next to it, so the number of Carbon atoms involved in the construction of this sphere would be two atoms per hexagon times the number of hexagons.

Knowing the mass of one carbon atom (1.992 x 10^-23 g) it is then possible to calculate the mass of a sphere.
Knowing the volume, we finally have the Density.

VoXup for 3D print !

Our goal was to design and print a part that could be expanded to a larger size. VoXup allows the designer to print a small part based on voxels and scale it up!

In a 2D world shapes and geometries are formed with units of pixels. In the 3D CAD world, the unit is a voxel, which is a cube. This way, when working with computer images and simulations, it is common to represent geometries with a series of cubes, i.e. voxels.

The VoXup is the skeleton of a cube. It has 8 legs which can extend increasing the size of the cube. An object made of VoXup’s retains geometry, but changes in scale. The closest real world item that can be resized is a hand-held telescope.

A VoXup unit volume, like a voxel, can be stretched in all directions so that the final cube is two or several times larger than the original. VoXup is a concept that can become reality with product design and manufacturing, and we like to imagine that one day anyone can buy a chair 10 cm high, print it and scale it up to 1 meter.

This Concept and Design is a cooperation with Mechanical Engineer Diego Bezerra.

Apartment X ... a different space !

We know that in the World of design concepts there are infinite options and infinite ideas, but when we want to turn these ideas into reality it is sometimes difficult. Architecture design is a form of art that sometimes separates from reality and just pushes a regular sized apartment to a million dollar construction project.

This concept focuses on volumes of an Apartment and reshapes the volume to obtain more space where needed and more accessibility.

Rooms with higher ceiling feel more spacious and it is important to have a higher ceiling in the rooms where most time is spent.

Bedrooms, bathrooms and even kitchen are places where we usually spend a short time. In bedroom we mostly lay on the bed to sleep or read. In bathrooms we take a quick shower and leave or lay in the tub. And finally, in the kitchen we stand to make a quick salad (or Ham sandwich for the Carnivores), or run to the fridge to grab a beer. All these rooms are places we spend less time, and thus having a lower ceiling would not influence our mood in the house but will grant us more space for the rooms where it matters.

Using this idea of space, Apartment X is designed to have double the height for main rooms and the lowest acceptable height for other rooms. For the sake of example the high rooms can be 5.5 meters and the low rooms can be 2.5 meters. This concept is shown in the picture below.



Two apartments joined together, form a perfect match to one floor height of 5.5 meters. This X fusion allows the apartment to have a larger area. Not just more comfortable space in the living room, more space for the entire apartment and also every apartment has an outside view on all four sides of the building. The video below is a simple demonstration of the "2X fusion 4000" (just so the title sounds fancy ! )

Below are some 3D designs of an Apartment X, a floor plan of two apartments, and an X building.
I would like to read your comments on this concept as an Architect or a person who might consider living in such an apartment.

ISO view of two Apartment X.

ISO Apartment X Layout

Floor Plan showing main access and each apartments' inner stairs.

ISO view of an X Building

Side view of the living space.

Finally I would like to thank my sister Rana Rouhana for her contribution on the development of this concept and her nice work modeling. Its good to have a talented Architect in the family.