
Researchers Create 'Super Black' Material (2014) - evo_9
http://www.designntrend.com/articles/16676/20140714/researchers-create-super-black-material-so-dark-the-human-eye-cannot-process-it.htm
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Dotnaught
It should be called 'fuligin,' in honor of Gene Wolfe.

"I put on the cloak... the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably
erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned,
showing only a featureless dark."

From The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe. Published by Simon & Schuster
in 1980

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1495](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1495)

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Cpoll
2014\. You can get some info from the wiki page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack)

Most interesting being the layman explanation: "Vantablack is composed of a
forest of vertical tubes which are "grown". When light strikes vantablack,
instead of bouncing off, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected among
the tubes, eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat."

I'd love to see someone walking around in a bodysuit made out of this stuff
(although I have no idea if it's flexible enough).

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heroprotagonist
This site got the name wrong. It's called 'vantablack'. It's also not 'ten
times stronger than steel' in the traditional sense, given that it's typical
use is going to be as a coating rather than a structural material. A microthin
layer of vantablack may have greater tensile strength than a microthin layer
of steel, but building girders of the stuff is infeasible.

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paavokoya
Well if you scroll down to the comments section you'll see the quality of
readership that site draws in.

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duncancarroll
Now that is really bad for the eyes! It’s just so... black! You can hardly
even make out its shape. Light just falls right into it.

</obligatory>

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sevensor
I'll see your Douglas Adams and raise you "None, none more black!"

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Millennium
I want to paint doors with this stuff. Especially red ones.

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ShakataGaNai
Not only is the material "super black" it:

> conducts heat seven and half times more effectively than copper, and the
> material is ten times stronger than steel.

Both of features are very useful. Heatsinks, spacecraft... all sorts of
awesome uses.

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dogma1138
The thermal conductivity is just because it's carbon, you can use other forms
of carbon like diamond which also have about 10 times the thermal conductivity
of copper.

Diamond is used sometimes in thermal pastes and adhesives one of its
disadvantages however is that it's quite abrasive so it cannot be used on
naked silicon dies or in applications that require thermal grease and are
hence under stress, I would suspect that other nanoforms of carbon are more or
less just as abrasive as diamond so they would have similar restrictions.

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adrianN
I don't think graphite is abrasive.

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dogma1138
Graphite also doesn't have that good of thermal conductivity it's actually
worse than copper in most cases.

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SimonPStevens
[2014]

