New Nanometal Changes from Hard to Soft at the Flip of a Switch
Hard to Soft at the Push of a Button Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres Materials scientists are constantly trying to tweak their products to be a little stronger, a little less brittle, a little more malleable--it's the engineer's job to imbue any material with the properties it needs to do its job. That often means striking a compromise between conflicting properties, but perhaps not for much longer. Researchers at the Technical University of Hamburg and the Helmholtz Center Geesthacht have engineered a new nanomaterial that changes from hard to soft with the flip of a switch. The material is essentially an electrically tunable metal that can be hard and brittle or soft and malleable depending on the charge passing through it. To create the material, researchers placed precious metals like gold and platinum in an acidic bath, where corrosion cuts tiny porous channels or ducts through the metal. Those interior...