Future of Engineering

Last spring Swedish Lamera won the aircraft industry's Crystal Cabin Awards with their lightweight steel Hybrix. It is a sandwich material that consists of microscopic steel fibres between two sheets of stainless steel.

It is thin (1-2 mm), strong and it can be processed and formed in the same ways and with the same tools as ordinary stainless steel. In fact, the only apparent difference is that it weighs about half as much.

Hybrix has been described as "magic" since it seems too thin and firm to be hollow but this story gets even better: Lamera has combined their invention with Decorex - a material developed by another Swedish steel company, Sandvik. Decorex is a steel surface processed on nano level that can be given different colours and structures.

One obvious area of use is aircraft interiors since there is A LOT of money to save with fewer kilos in the air. Hybrix itself was developed at the well-known bionic intersection of biology and engineering.

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Keywords: Swedish Lamera, Lightweight steel Hybrix, Sandwich material, Decorex

Labels: Aerospace-Engineering, Material-Sciences