(WSIL) -- New research at SIU's Engineering Department could change the way we travel in the future.
That's according to Professor Sabrina Nilufar and her team.
They say the material they're making will make planes, trains, automobiles and everything in between lighter safer and more efficient, and it all starts with sandwiches.
"It's just like two breads, those are our face sheets and inside the core material is your meat," said SIU Engineering Professor Dr. Sabrina Nilufar.
Professor Nilufar says these sandwich structures are the first of their kind -- Using triply periodic minimal surface architecture (TPMS) for short.
They're using 3-D printing instead of more costly and wasteful industrial manufacturing.
"Sandwich structures has a lot of engineering applications starting from automotive industries, airplane industries, sportswear, vibration and acoustic isolation, thermal insulation so we have many engineering applications." said Nilufar.
Her team has been working for two years perfecting this specific type of sandwich.
It's a material Nilufar says could increase efficiency from the vehicles we drive to planes in the sky.
"We're working on like optimizing these structures to find the most you know the best mechanical properties that we can find so we want them to be lighter, we want them to be stronger and like have better thermomechanical properties," said one SIU Engineering Grad Student.
If and when the research is published and used in products we use every day.
"This could be potentially world changing? asked News Three's Brandon Merano. Yeah, answered Dr. Nilufar.
It's all thanks to a team of three workers trying to print the perfect sandwich.
Gloss