Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new material that combines the strength of steel and the lightness of plastic. Doctor Michael Strano, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the lead author of this study, said the new material is even harder to break than bulletproof glass. “If you look at it chemically, it’s close to kevlar,” he explained. “We make bulletproof vests out of it — if you’re a mountain climber it’s very strong cables.” In addition to its strength, Strano said the material can create tight seals. “If you put your sandwich in a plastic bag you’re trying to keep oxygen out. Believe it or not, eventually, oxygen does get through that plastic bag,” he explained. “This material, as best we can tell, you can make a much much thinner sheet than that plastic bag and there’s no gas that can get through it.”
Researchers say this new material could be used to make everything from lightweight coatings for cars and phones to important infrastructure such as bridges. “There’s excitement because that may open up a whole new class of materials that are strong in new kinds of ways,” said Strano. Polymers, which include all plastics, consist of chains of building blocks called monomers. These chains grow by adding new molecules onto their ends. Once formed, polymers can be shaped into three-dimensional objects, such as water bottles, using injection molding. Polymer scientists have long hypothesized that if polymers could be induced to grow into a two-dimensional sheet, they should form extremely strong, lightweight materials. However, many decades of work in this field led to the conclusion that it was impossible to create such sheets. One reason for this was that if just one monomer rotates up or down, out of the plane of the growing sheet, the material will begin expanding in three dimensions and the sheet-like structure will be lost.
Click here for the video
Credits:
https://news.mit.edu/2022/polymer-lightweight-material-2d-0202
No comments:
Post a Comment