This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

Super-Polymer

There are polymers that are strong and polymers that are flexible, but what about one that can be either one? That's what researchers from the University of Rochester take developed. This cloth can be stretched and contorted into most any shape, so yous employ some estrus and it snaps dorsum. The kicker: It snaps back with so much strength that information technology can lift ane,000 times its weight.

The material has a default shape, which information technology remembers despite twisting and stretching. That's why it'due south known equally a shape-memory polymer. Pb researcher Mitch Anthamatten and graduate student Yuan Meng adult this material by controlling the crystallization that occurs when the material is warmed or cooled.

As you stretch this fabric, long chains of polymers are deformed as segments of molecules come up into alignment — these areas are chosen crystallites. That fixes the material into the shape you lot've pulled it into. It'southward how you lot expect most plastics to behave; one time they're deformed, they don't just go back.

The key to this polymer's remarkable abilities is that when it's heated, the network of crystallites to intermission autonomously, and the polymers snap back to their stable permanent shape. The more it'southward stretched, the more crystallites are formed, and the more energy is stored. It'southward possible at a sure point to generate then many crystallites that the distorted shape becomes also stable, though.

Right at present, the polymer is tuned to respond to a temperature of roughly 35 degrees Celsius (that's 95 degrees F). This is important for the above demonstration, equally information technology'southward just slightly below human body temperature, causing the polymer to snap back to it's normal shape when Anthamatten touches it. By varying the mixture of molecular linkers amongst the polymer strands, different versions of the shape-memory polymer can be designed that operate at higher or lower temperatures.

Other shape-memory polymers have been created, but they don't function quite equally aggressively as the one adult at the University of Rochester. Information technology loses very little of the mechanical energy stored in the crystallites, which is what gives information technology the power to exert so much force when it returns to its original shape. At one,000 times its weight, a strand of this material equal to a shoelace (about 1 gram) could lift a ane-liter soda bottle.

Anthamatten suggests that this textile could take a diversity of medical applications like self-tightening sutures and artificial skin. Clothing with shape-retentiveness polymers could also adapt to the size of the wearer automatically when worn.