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New Self-Stretching Material Can Revert Back to Original Shape

Although most materials slightly expand when heated, there is a new class of rubber-like material that not only self-stretches upon cooling - it reverts back to its original shape when heated, all without physical manipulation. The material is like a shape-memory polymer because it can be switched between two different shapes. "However, unlike other shape-memory polymers, the material does not need to be programmed each cycle - it repeatedly switches shapes, with no external forces, simply upon cooling and heating," says Mitchell Anthamatten, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Rochester. Anthamatten and his team built on the success of a recently developed polymer that can also stretch when cooled. The other polymers need to have small loads - or weights - attached in order to direct the shape to be taken. That is not the case with the new polymer, because Anthamatten's team 'tricked it into thinking' a load was attached. The team envisions the material being applied to a number of areas in which reversible shape-changes are needed during operations, including biotechnology, artificial muscles, and robotics.

Topics:
Automation Materials Medical Plastics Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 Hi. My name is Mitch Anthamatten and I'm with the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Rochester. I'm going tell you about a very interesting material that my research group has developed. Here is a sample of a polymer elastomer that is called a shape memory polymer and we've made this material that you can simply stretch. So you apply force to it so the network chains have been deformed and bringing them closer to their crystalline state. So simply by applying a force, the material crystallizes and the crystallization causes the material to stabilize the shape, this deformed shape. So I can actually let go of the sample and you can see that it's been stabilized in the stretch state and what's unique about this material is even contacting

    00:00:54 the body is enough to melt those crystals causing it to retract to its original shape and I'm just pressing my finger against the material and it's recovering to its original shape and it's also releasing all of that stored elastic energy that was in the samples. So here we have it. The material has fully recovered. We're really excited about applications that can come from such properties. We're particularly interested in biomedical applications, where the recovery temperature needs to be near the human body temperature and at the same time the shape memory polymer has to exert a lot of forces during the recovery process releasing a lot of the stored energy.

    00:01:41 A production of the University of Rochester. Please visit us online and subscribe to our channel for more videos.