New super-material is light as plastic & twice as strong as steel

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a new "impossible" super-material that they claim is twice as strong as steel, as light as plastic and able to withstand up to six times more force than bulletproof glass.

What makes the material even more interesting, is that it can be manufactured in large quantities. 

Applications for such a material are far-reaching and it could be used for car parts and smartphones, or as a material in the construction of bridges or other structures, said Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

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"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."

Researchers have filed for two patents on the process used to develop the material.

The new material was made using a new polymerisation technique. Unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains, the new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets. Scientists had, until now, believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.

However, in the new study, researchers created a 2D sheet called a polyaramide, which can be made into discs and stacked on top of each other, making for strong and highly stable material that is still light.

"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 said. "This mechanism happens spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesise 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 also claim that films of the material, which they call 2DPA-1, could have applications in coatings, for example protecting metal in cars or steel structures.

"With this advance, we have planar molecules that are going to be much easier to fashion into a very strong, but extremely thin material," said Strano.

Read more: Carbon capture tech instantly converts CO2 to solid carbon

Strano and his team are now studying how the polymer forms 2D sheets in deeper detail, as well as experimenting with changes to its molecular structure to create other new materials. 

The research was funded by the Center for Enhanced Nanofluidic Transport (CENT) an Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the US Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Army Research Laboratory.

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