MIT researchers have created a new material that's as light as plastic and as strong as steel.
The new material can be used in a number of ways, from lightweight coatings for cars and phones to building blocks for structures such as big as bridges. It can also be manufactured in large quantities, according to Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of a new study.
“We don’t usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things,” Strano said in a statement. “It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that.”
What makes this material different from others is that it's a two-dimensional polymer that can self-assemble into sheets. All other polymers form one-dimensional, "spaghetti-like chains." Researchers did not believe it was possible to have polymers create 2D sheets until now.
“Instead of making a spaghetti-like molecule, we can make a sheet-like molecular plane, where we get molecules to hook themselves together in two dimensions,” Strano says. “This mechanism happens spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesize the material, we can easily spin-coat thin films that are extraordinarily strong.”
Elastic modules are a measure of how much force it takes to deform a material, and researchers determined that this new material's elastic modules is between four and six times greater than that of bulletproof glass.
The amount of force it takes to break the material, or yield strength, is twice that of steel. The interesting part is that the new material has only about one-sixth the density of steel.
"An important aspect of these new polymers is that they are readily processable in solution, which will facilitate numerous new applications where high strength to weight ratio is important, such as new composite or diffusion barrier materials," Matthew Tirrell, dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, said in MIT's statement.
Polymer scientists have worked on creating a two-dimensional material like this for decades, knowing all the possible ways it could be used if they succeeded.
“With this advance, we have planar molecules that are going to be much easier to fashion into a very strong, but extremely thin material,” Strano said.
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