Researchers from MIT were successful in developing a new material that is as strong as steel but lighter than plastic. Here’s all you need to know about the revolutionary material.
Revolutionary new strong material that’s lighter than plastic
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a new material with high strength and low weight. “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. It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that,” stated Michael Strano. Strano, the senior author of the study, is a professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.
Additionally, manufacturing the material in larger quantities is an easy feat. Its application ranges from building blocks, electronics, car coating to bridges and buildings. According to the MIT professor, it’s several times stronger than bulletproof glass and requires double the force to break. The material has just one-sixth the density of steel. The product was developed with a new process for forming polymers.
More about polymer research
Polymers are chains of molecules known as monomers. They are formed by linking monomers with chemical bonds. Polymers usually expand into 3D objects. If one of the monomers starts rotating, the polymers turn into a 3D structure. With the project, the researchers are trying to see if they can create a 2-D version of a polymer that can stay flat, making it lightweight. They tried coming up with solutions for decades before the new process was developed. The study is published in Nature, a peer-reviewed journal.
The idea was developed from a building process allowing the linking of monomers. Additionally, it can help in growing a polymer chain without monomers going astray, hence, if several such 2D polymer sheets can be built, they can be layered and stacked in a tight space.