Creating Adaptable, Shapeshifting Materials
Michigan Engineering researchers are exploring how to create nanomaterials that can change their shape when needed, allowing for innovations like flexible steel. Sharon Glotzer, professor of chemical engineering, discusses her team's research goals.
Transcript
00:00:03 Next Generation materials will be defined by their ability to adapt and change their properties materials that can change their shape shape shifters we want to be able to make a kind of material that can flow when it wants to flow that can be rigid when it needs to be rigid that can appear one way or appear another way being able to do that means that you understand
00:00:28 everything about that material at the level of the individual building blocks and you can control how those building blocks are arranged with nano technology all types of materials are possible think about this hunk of brass this is made of atoms but imagine that instead of a big chunk of metal like this we wanted to make um something that down at a smaller length scale millions of times
00:00:56 smaller than than the size of this this chunk of metal had a structure that was much more complicated something like this where there were many different parts and the parts had many many different shapes and we wanted to make all the parts separately and throw them all in a bucket and have them self assemble self-organized into this complex structure those design
00:01:16 principles those design rules are what we're trying to figure out there are so many different possible applications other types of materials that that you could Envision are materials that combine the the strength of steel with the flexibility and formability of a plastic materials that change the way that other objects appear transformation Optics photonic band Gap materials meta
00:01:40 materials negative index materials these are all materials that trap light a certain way or bend light a certain way we're working on camouflage materials part of my group's goals is to steal from the ideas of biology and try to bring that complexity into traditional materials creatures like the octopus exhibit phenomenally complex camouflage
00:02:07 capability we have no idea how to make materials that can be as sophisticated as an octopus all of the challenges the problems that for as computational scientists used to be compute limited problems that we could we couldn't simulate fast enough to um to get the answers that we wanted now all of a sudden we can simulate extremely fast
00:02:34 which means that we've turned our compute problem into a data problem and now we can explore bazillions of different combinations of building blocks to to predict far in advance of experiments what might be the most exciting combinations of building blocks to look like what kinds of new materials are possible to sort of Shine the Light for um for experiments to then go test
00:02:59 out our prediction we can seek to combine Properties by Design so using carbon nanot tubes and building them into complex three-dimensional structures these are some models of 3D structures of nanot tubes that we are Manufacturing in the lab today