Monterrey- Using a novel polymerization process, chemical engineers at MIT have created a material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily produced in large quantities, SciTechDayly reported.
It is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all others that form one-dimensional spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists believed that it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.
The polymer could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car or cell phone parts or as a building material for bridges or other structures, the new lead author, Michael Strano, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT, told SciTechDayly.
“We don’t normally think of plastics as something you could use to hold up a building, but with this material you can enable new things. It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about it.”
Polymers, which include all plastics, consist of chains of building blocks called monomers that grow by adding new molecules to their ends. Once formed, the polymers can be molded into three-dimensional objects, such as water bottles, by injection molding.
Scientists have long hypothesized that if polymers could be induced to grow in a two-dimensional sheet, they should form extremely strong and lightweight materials. But many decades of work in this field led to the conclusion that it was impossible to create such sheets.
However, Strano and his colleagues came up with a new process that allows them to generate a two-dimensional sheet called polyaramid.
“Instead of making a spaghetti-shaped molecule, we can make a sheet-shaped molecular plane, where we make the molecules latch onto each other in two dimensions,” Strano explained. “This mechanism occurs spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesize the material, we can easily spin-coat thin films that are extraordinarily strong.”
#create #polymer #stronger #steel