Scientists engineer new material that can absorb and release enormous
amounts of energy
Date:
February 2, 2022
Source:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Summary:
A team of researchers recently announced that they had engineered a
new rubber-like solid substance that has surprising qualities. It
can absorb and release very large quantities of energy. And it
is programmable.
Taken together, this new material holds great promise for a very
wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power
without using additional energy, to new helmets and protective
materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly.
FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst
recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
that they had engineered a new rubber-like solid substance that has
surprising qualities. It can absorb and release very large quantities
of energy. And it is programmable.
Taken together, this new material holds great promise for a very wide
array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without
using additional energy, to new helmets and protective materials that
can dissipate energy much more quickly.
========================================================================== "Imagine a rubber band," says Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science
and engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author. "You pull
it back, and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a
super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate
extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go,
it flies for a mile." This hypothetical rubber band is made out of a new metamaterial -- a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally occurring materials - - that combines an elastic, rubber-like substance with tiny magnets embedded in it. This new "elasto-magnetic"
material takes advantage of a physical property known as a phase shift to greatly amplify the amount of energy the material can release or absorb.
A phase shift occurs when a material moves from one state to another:
think of water turning into steam or liquid concrete hardening into a
sidewalk. Whenever a material shifts its phase, energy is either released
or absorbed. And phase shifts aren't just limited to changes between
liquid, solid and gaseous states -- a shift can occur from one solid phase
to another. A phase shift that releases energy can be harnessed as a power source, but getting enough energy has always been the difficult part.
"To amplify energy release or absorption, you have to engineer a new
structure at the molecular or even atomic level," says Crosby. However,
this is challenging to do and even more difficult to do in a predictable
way. But by using metamaterials, Crosby says that "we have overcome these challenges, and have not only made new materials, but also developed
the design algorithms that allow these materials to be programmed with
specific responses, making them predictable." The team has been inspired
by some of the lightning-quick responses seen in nature: the snapping-shut
of Venus flytraps and trap-jaw ants. "We've taken this to the next level,"
says Xudong Liang, the paper's lead author, currently a professor at
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen (HITSZ) in China who completed
this research while a postdoc at UMass Amherst. "By embedding tiny magnets
into the elastic material, we can control the phase transitions of this metamaterial. And because the phase shift is predictable and repeatable,
we can engineer the metamaterial to do exactly what we want it to do:
either absorbing the energy from a large impact, or releasing great
quantities of energy for explosive movement." This research, which was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office as well as Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen (HITSZ),
has applications in any scenario where either high-force impacts or lightning-quick responses are needed.
========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_Massachusetts_Amherst. Note: Content may be edited for
style and length.
========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Xudong Liang, Hongbo Fu, Alfred J. Crosby. Phase-transforming
metamaterial with magnetic interactions. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (1): e2118161119 DOI:
10.1073/ pnas.2118161119 ==========================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220202134716.htm
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