A New Shock Absorber Design
This new compression design could be the thing that keeps you out of the auto body shop next time you accidentally back into an unseen post. The prototype above is a 3-D printed, 3.5-inch nylon structure that can repeatedly absorb the energy of a 100 mph fastball in 0.03 seconds.
Mechanical engineers at the University of Texas at Austin weren’t content with the shock absorbers commonly used in automobiles, football helmets, aerospace applications and military gear. Even the newer honeycomb-patterned materials, which can compress only once during the force of a collision, weren’t good enough.
So they rethought what happens when an object gets crushed and came up with a structure they call a negative-stiffness honeycomb, which can absorb energy from an impact and then return to its original shape. Read more and see an infographic below.