The Secret Science of Superheroes by Mark Lorch & Andy Miah

Author:Mark Lorch & Andy Miah
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788012652
Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
Published: 2017-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

8.2.1 The Bat Gloves

Batman is wearing more than gloves. These armoured beauties fall into the gauntlet category of handwear, and for good reason. Not only do the scallop-finned gauntlets totally adhere to this year’s Autumn/Winter fashion trend, they spare Batman from injuries incurred from bullets and swords. The fins can even be fired off and used as projectiles aimed at enemies. Given their propensity to remain undamaged even after such fierce impacts, they must be made of pretty tough stuff, but their amazing abilities don’t end there. They are shockproof and resistant to radiation. Meeting all of these challenging properties in one material can be tricky, but this is made easier by using a combination of materials with these desired properties and designing a material in such a way that said desired properties of materials are not compromised by one another’s presence. Given that the gloves also need to be light enough and flexible enough for Batman to not compromise his best fight choreography, these materials need to be strong but have a low density. However, when we talk about a material’s strength, we can mean a range of things, and so it is important to explore this term first.1

The strength of a material is its capacity to withstand different forces and return to its original shape or size without breaking or getting squashed. This includes a material’s capacity to not dent or become otherwise deformed in shape, not break, not get scratched, and also withstand extremes in temperature and pressure, and not fall apart after just a handful of uses. There are various ways of measuring a material’s tensile strength, from pulling it apart, to measuring a material’s modulus of rupture using a three-point-bend test to see how much force it can withstand before fracturing or bending out of shape. It’s also possible to measure its robustness by poking it with an indenter.

In the case of Batman’s gauntlets, they must be made of a material with high tensile strength, so that it does not tear with the impact of a weapon, with the addition of being flexible enough to wear, and elastic enough to absorb and dissipate the energy of the impact to save him and his wrists from the shock, while also saving him from radiation. A material like graphene,1 the wonder material that is said to fix almost every problem, could certainly meet the challenge of strength with its huge tensile strength of 130 000 MPa (mega pascals – the unit of measurement when discussing strength in this way). Graphene is also flexible, allowing Batman to fight unimpeded.

The problem is that graphene only exists in a two-dimensional single layer of carbon atoms, and this is not only difficult to work with, it is also very difficult to manufacture in a large enough area for it to be used in this way, and we are still not 100% sure about how it may interact with the human body, owing to its nano-dimensional structure.

While carbon nanotubes are also a

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