Innovation Rainmakers

Principle

31. Porous Materials

a. Make an object porous or use additional porous elements

(inserts, covers etc).

b. If an object is already porous fill the pores in advance with

some substance

Principle Description: Change the conditions of a gas, liquid or solid by making is more porous (create voids).

Hints on Usage: Media can be made more porous by creating voids, bubbles, capillaries, etc. These pores can consist of nothing (vacuums) or be filled with gases, liquids or solids that provide one or more useful functions. Porosity can also exist at many levels from microscopic to macro (drilled holes or honeycomb cells).

Assess how porosity can provide increased functionality. For example, porosity can reduce weight, carry coolant, provide for air flow, serve as a filter, etc.

This principle also goes beyond mechanical systems to include any porous resource, substance, space, time, information, fields or functions. For example, information can be porous; time can be porous, etc.

Examples:

High quality (no loss) storage of a digital image consumes too much memory. Information can be reduced when what is needed is more efficient storage. In many cases, the loss of this information does not reduce the interpreted quality of the image.

Aerogels are materials that are unusually lightweight because nearly all of their volume is air and less than a few percent of their volume is actually material. They are formed by creating microscopic porosity in the material and are used as insulation material in lightweight, high energy density capacitors.

Sintered bronzed bushings are porous and can hold lubricant for release when supporting a rotating shaft.

In the world of corporate security, the protection of trade secrets can be achieved by empowering different people with only enough information to do their jobs. No one person would possess all of the information required to reproduce the product or technology. Filling the holes is a function of different people working together under controlled conditions. For example, marketing personnel may have access to customer lists but not product or processing engineering details. Engineers don’t have access to customer lists. Neither can reproduce the combined results of developing and marketing the company’s product easily on their own.

Sound reduction on pneumatic presses is accomplished by passing the rejected air from the pneumatic cylinder through a porous plastic to muffle the sound.

Fragmenting (creating porosity in) someone’s attention through multiple distractions is an effective diversionary tactic.

Strategically placed perforations (porosity) help a reader service card tear away from a magazine insert.