Lightweight Grinder Proof Lock on the Way?

A new artificial material effectively cannot be cut, holding out the promise of lightweight but cut-proof bike locks, security doors and protective clothing.

Its inventors embedded ceramic spheres in aluminium foam to create a material that couldn’t be cut with angle grinders, power drills or water jet cutters. They dubbed it Proteus after the shape-shifting Greek god, for the way the material metamorphosised in different ways to defend against attacks.

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Er, but those surfaces were cut into and drilled into in the video.

You can cut into the material until you encounter one of the ceramic spheres, which is what will turn the energy of the tool against itself to prevent them from going farther.

They do admit that with a drill it possible to find a route between the spheres to drill through it, but that can be mitigated against.

One way to ensure that does not happen is to have many layers of the spheres, which are offset relative to each other. Thereby, even if one layer is missed, there is another layer or two behind the first one to ensure that there are no gaps. If the structure is stochastic, it becomes a statistical problem. If the structure is strictly architected, it is a matter of quality control and precision of the manufacturing. In our initial configuration we only had two sparse layers with associated likelihood of ‘missing’ a sphere approximately 1/9 based on our limited tests.

Quote from the full paper below. Also see tables 2 and 4 in it to see the difference including metal fibres had on the resistance to drilling.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65976-0#Sec8

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