{"id":14006,"date":"2016-07-25T08:27:16","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T07:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.compositestoday.com\/?p=14006"},"modified":"2016-07-25T08:32:58","modified_gmt":"2016-07-25T07:32:58","slug":"research-engineers-create-new-nanolayered-composites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.compositestoday.com\/2016\/07\/research-engineers-create-new-nanolayered-composites\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Engineers Create New Nanolayered Composites"},"content":{"rendered":"

The discovery could open up wide-ranging possibilities for designing new, easy-to-manufacture composites for optical devices, electronic systems, and high-tech materials.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adapting an old trick used for centuries by both metal-smiths and pastry makers, a team of researchers at MIT has found a way to efficiently create composite materials containing hundreds of layers that are just atoms thick but span the full width of the material.<\/p>\n

Materials such as graphene, a two-dimensional form of pure carbon, and carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders that are essentially rolled-up graphene, are some of the strongest, hardest materials available, because their atoms are held together entirely by carbon-carbon bonds, which are the strongest nature gives us for chemical bonds to work with. So, researchers have been searching for ways of using these nano-materials to add great strength to composite materials, much the way steel bars are used to reinforce concrete.<\/p>\n

The biggest obstacle has been finding ways to embed these materials within a matrix of another material in an orderly way. These tiny sheets and tubes have a strong tendency to clump together, so just stirring them into a batch of liquid resin before it sets doesn\u2019t work at all. The MIT team\u2019s insight was in finding a way to create large numbers of layers, stacked in a perfectly orderly way, without having to stack each layer individually.<\/p>\n

Although the process is more complex than it sounds, at the heart of it is a technique similar to that used to make ultra-strong steel sword blades, as well as the puff pastry that\u2019s in baklava and napoleons. A layer of material made of either steel, dough, or graphene is spread out flat. Then, the material is doubled over on itself, pounded or rolled out, and then doubled over again, and again, and again.<\/p>\n

With each fold, the number of layers doubles, thus producing an exponential increase in the layering. Just 20 simple folds would produce more than a million perfectly aligned layers.<\/p>\n

Now, it doesn\u2019t work out exactly that way on the nanoscale. In this research, rather than folding the material, the team cut the whole block \u2014 itself consisting of alternating layers of graphene and the composite material \u2014 into quarters, and then slid one-quarter on top of another, quadrupling the number of layers, and then repeating the process. But the result was the same: a uniform stack of layers, quickly produced, and already embedded in the matrix material, in this case polycarbonate, to form a composite.<\/p>\n

In their proof-of-concept tests, the MIT team produced composites with up to 320 layers of graphene embedded in them. They were able to demonstrate that even though the total amount of the graphene added to the material was minuscule \u2014 less than 1\/10 of a percent by weight \u2014 it led to a clear-cut improvement in overall strength.<\/p>\n

The team also found a way to make structured fibres from graphene, potentially enabling the creation of yarns and fabrics with embedded electronic functions, as well as yet another class of composites. The method uses a shearing mechanism, somewhat like a cheese slicer, to peel off layers of graphene in a way that causes them to roll up into a scroll-like shape, technically known as an Archimedean spiral.<\/p>\n

That could overcome one of the biggest drawbacks of graphene and nanotubes, in terms of their ability to be woven into long fibres: their extreme slipperiness. Because they are so perfectly smooth, strands slip past each other instead of sticking together in a bundle. And the new scrolled strands not only overcome that problem, they are also extremely stretchy, unlike other super-strong materials such as Kevlar. That means they might lend themselves to being woven into protective materials that could \u201cgive\u201d without breaking.<\/p>\n

One unexpected feature of the new layered composites is that the graphene layers, which are extremely electrically conductive, maintain their continuity all the way across their composite sample without any short-circuiting to the adjacent layers. So, for example, simply inserting an electrical probe into the stack to a certain precise depth would make it possible to uniquely address any one of the hundreds of layers. This could ultimately lead to new kinds of complex multilayered electronics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The discovery could open up wide-ranging possibilities for designing new, easy-to-manufacture composites for optical devices, electronic systems, and high-tech materials. Adapting an old trick used for centuries by both metal-smiths and pastry makers, a team of researchers at MIT has found a way to efficiently create composite materials containing hundreds of layers that are just atoms thick but span the full width of the material. Materials such as graphene, a two-dimensional form of pure carbon, and carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[512,891],"tags":[608,127,731,110],"class_list":["post-14006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-composites-news","category-research","tag-graphene","tag-kevlar","tag-mit","tag-usa"],"yoast_head":"\nResearch Engineers Create New Nanolayered Composites<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The discovery could open up wide-ranging possibilities for designing new, 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