Engineers at the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics have made an aluminum tube that will not sink. Punch it full of holes, hold it underwater for weeks, and it still comes back up. Their work appeared in Advanced Functional Materials in January.
The method is a laser. Chunlei Guo's lab etches pits into the inside of the tube at microscopic and nanoscopic scale, which makes the surface repel water so strongly it stays dry underwater and traps a stable bubble of air inside. A divider across the middle keeps the bubble from escaping even when the tube is shoved straight down.
The idea came from animals. Diving bell spiders carry a pocket of air down with them and breathe from it. Fire ants link their water-repellent bodies into living rafts to survive floods. Both stay afloat by holding onto air rather than sealing water out.
Headlines reached for the Titanic, but that is not what this is. A ship's hull that fills with water is still a hull full of water, and the largest tube tested in the lab was under half a meter. What the researchers built is not a hull. It is a float that keeps floating after something puts a hole in it.
That turns out to be the useful part. Linked into rafts, the tubes are proposed for buoys, floating platforms, and ocean monitoring equipment — things that have to stay up in rough water and cannot be hauled in for repair. The team also showed a raft that harvests energy from waves, and kept working after the tubes were damaged.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
