11 feb 2022

MIT INVENTS NEW STRONGER-THAN-STEEL POLYMER

"Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities", writes Anne Trafton at N ews Mit Edu. "The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets", adds the website. "Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures", says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study. The research was funded by the Center for Enhanced Nanofluidic Transport (CENT) an Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Army Research Laboratory.

 

THE NEW MATERIAL HAS VERY UNUSUAL PROPERTIES

"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," he says. "It has very unusual properties and we're very excited about that." The researchers have filed for two patents on the process they used to generate the material, which they describe in a paper appearing today in Nature. MIT postdoc Yuwen Zeng is the lead author of the study.

 

A NEW POLYMERIZATION PROCESS THAT ALLOWS TO GENERATE A POLYARAMIDE

Polymer scientists have long hypothesized that if polymers could be induced to grow into a two-dimensional sheet, they should form extremely strong, lightweight materials. However, many decades of work in this field led to the conclusion that it was impossible to create such sheets. One reason for this was that if just one monomer rotates up or down, out of the plane of the growing sheet, the material will begin expanding in three dimensions and the sheet-like structure will be lost. Strano and his colleagues came up with a new polymerization process that allows them to generate a two-dimensional sheet called a polyaramide. For the monomer building blocks, they use a compound called melamine, which contains a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Under the right conditions, these monomers can grow in two dimensions, forming disks. These disks stack on top of each other, held together by hydrogen bonds between the layers, which make the structure very stable and strong.

 

FROM A SPAGHETTI-LIKE MOLECULE TO A SHEET-LIKE MOLECULAR PLANE

"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 explains. "This mechanism happens spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesize the material, we can easily spin-coat thin films that are extraordinarily strong." Because the material self-assembles in solution, it can be made in large quantities by simply increasing the quantity of the starting materials. The researchers showed that they could coat surfaces with films of the material, which they call 2DPA-1. "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 says.

 

THE NEW MATERIAL IS REALLY STRONG

The researchers found that the new material's elastic modulus is between four and six times greater than that of bulletproof glass. They also found that its yield strength, or how much force it takes to break the material, is twice that of steel, even though the material has only about one-sixth the density of steel. Matthew Tirrell, dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, says that the new technique "embodies some very creative chemistry to make these bonded 2D polymers." "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," says Tirrell, who was not involved in the study.



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