Making materials to order
A team of researchers at MIT has found a way to make complex composite materials whose attributes can be fine-tuned to give various desirable combinations of properties such as stiffness, strength, resistance to impacts and energy dissipation.The key feature of the new composites is a “co-continuous” structure of two different materials with very different properties, creating a material combining aspects of both. The co-continuous structure means that the two interleaved materials each form a kind of three-dimensional lattice whose pieces are fully connected to each other from side to side, front to back, and top to bottom.The research — by postdoc Lifeng Wang, who worked with undergraduate Jacky Lau and professors Mary Boyce and Edwin Thomas — was published in April in the journal Advanced Materials. The research was funded by the U.S. Army through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.The initial objective of the research was to “try to design...