Magic Rubber-Like Programmable Material By Brian Simpson

This is something interesting I found, much more so than the fact that today my MacBook Pro spell check is saying that very word typed is incorrect, including “a.” It suggests exotic French words as replacements.  Then for some reason the “e” key decides not to work, so I would use spell check to correct the missing “e,” as every word, as I said is in error. Anyway, my son said to just connect up a new/old keyboard, and here we go to report on a programmable rubber-like substance. Perhaps it could be used to make more flexible key boards?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220202134716.htm?utm_source=gnaa

“A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had engineered a new rubber-like solid substance that has surprising qualities. It can absorb and release very large quantities of energy. And it is programmable. Taken together, this new material holds great promise for a very wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without using additional energy, to new helmets and protective materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly.

"Imagine a rubber band," says Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author. "You pull it back, and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go, it flies for a mile."

This hypothetical rubber band is made out of a new metamaterial -- a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally occurring materials -- that combines an elastic, rubber-like substance with tiny magnets embedded in it. This new "elasto-magnetic" material takes advantage of a physical property known as a phase shift to greatly amplify the amount of energy the material can release or absorb.

A phase shift occurs when a material moves from one state to another: think of water turning into steam or liquid concrete hardening into a sidewalk. Whenever a material shifts its phase, energy is either released or absorbed. And phase shifts aren't just limited to changes between liquid, solid and gaseous states -- a shift can occur from one solid phase to another. A phase shift that releases energy can be harnessed as a power source, but getting enough energy has always been the difficult part.

"To amplify energy release or absorption, you have to engineer a new structure at the molecular or even atomic level," says Crosby. However, this is challenging to do and even more difficult to do in a predictable way. But by using metamaterials, Crosby says that "we have overcome these challenges, and have not only made new materials, but also developed the design algorithms that allow these materials to be programmed with specific responses, making them predictable."

The team has been inspired by some of the lightning-quick responses seen in nature: the snapping-shut of Venus flytraps and trap-jaw ants. "We've taken this to the next level," says Xudong Liang, the paper's lead author, currently a professor at Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen (HITSZ) in China who completed this research while a postdoc at UMass Amherst. "By embedding tiny magnets into the elastic material, we can control the phase transitions of this metamaterial. And because the phase shift is predictable and repeatable, we can engineer the metamaterial to do exactly what we want it to do: either absorbing the energy from a large impact, or releasing great quantities of energy for explosive movement."

This research, which was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office as well as Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen (HITSZ), has applications in any scenario where either high-force impacts or lightning-quick responses are needed.”

https://www.pnas.org/content/119/1/e2118161119

Abstract

Solid–solid phase transformations can affect energy transduction and change material properties (e.g., superelasticity in shape memory alloys and soft elasticity in liquid crystal elastomers). Traditionally, phase-transforming materials are based on atomic- or molecular-level thermodynamic and kinetic mechanisms. Here, we develop elasto-magnetic metamaterials that display phase transformation behaviors due to nonlinear interactions between internal elastic structures and embedded, macroscale magnetic domains. These phase transitions, similar to those in shape memory alloys and liquid crystal elastomers, have beneficial changes in strain state and mechanical properties that can drive actuations and manage overall energy transduction. The constitutive response of the elasto-magnetic metamaterial changes as the phase transitions occur, resulting in a nonmonotonic stress–strain relation that can be harnessed to enhance or mitigate energy storage and release under high–strain-rate events, such as impulsive recoil and impact. Using a Landau free energy–based predictive model, we develop a quantitative phase map that relates the geometry and magnetic interactions to the phase transformation. Our work demonstrates how controllable phase transitions in metamaterials offer performance capabilities in energy management and programmable material properties for high-rate applications.”

I suppose the CCP already has this technology.