California Institute of Technology and others developing new high-strength nanostructured materials

2024-03-12

Recently, an international research team led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) published a paper in the journal Nature Materials, introducing a newly developed carbon nanostructure material that can effectively absorb the impact energy of supersonic particles and has better protective effects than Kevlar composite fiber materials under the same mass. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Z ü rich) participated in the relevant research.

Researchers suggest that this material is thinner than a strand of hair and consists of interconnected tetrahedral structures. This tetrahedral structure, also known as "Kelvin Cells," was first proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1887, indicating that it is the structure with the smallest surface area filling the same volume of three-dimensional space. Caltech researchers used two-photon lithography to prepare this material in photosensitive polymers, which were then transformed into pyrolytic carbon using extremely high temperatures. After testing, the performance of this material is 100% higher than that of steel and 70% higher than that of Kevlar composite fiber materials under the same quality.

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