The elastic material with embedded magnets whose poles are color-coded red and blue. Orienting the magnets in different directions changes the metamaterial’s response.
Credit: UMass Amherst
Researchers inspired by nature to create a new, programmable super “metamaterial”
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.”
Original Article: SCIENTISTS AT UMASS AMHERST ENGINEER NEW MATERIAL THAT CAN ABSORB AND RELEASE ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF ENERGY
More from: University of Massachusetts | Harbin Institute of Technology
The Latest Updates from Bing News & Google News
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Programmable metamaterial
- The Best Programmable Thermostats for Today’s Home
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, you could save up to $180 per year on your energy bill simply by upgrading an outdated thermostat to a programmable model. Newer models keep track ...
- Breakthrough 6G antenna could lead to high-speed communications and holograms
Scientists build the world's first 6G antenna that, when fitted into devices, can transmit data at high speeds.
- Metasurface antenna could enable future 6G communications networks
The DMA uses specially designed, fully tunable metamaterial elements that have ... previous cutting-edge developments in reconfigurable programmable antennas. "In recent years, DMAs have been ...
- Research breakthrough could enable future 6G comms networks
The DMA uses specially-designed, fully-tunable metamaterial elements which have been carefully ... which leaps beyond previous cutting-edge developments in reconfigurable programmable antennas. “In ...
- RBI To Pilot Offline & Programmable Retail CBDCs
In its monetary policy statement, the central bank said that it will enable additional functionalities such as offline capability and programmability for CBDC retail payments RBI also plans to ...
Go deeper with Google Headlines on:
Programmable metamaterial
[google_news title=”” keyword=”programmable metamaterial” num_posts=”5″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Elasto-magnetic material
- Exceptionally large transverse thermoelectric effect produced by combining thermoelectric and magnetic materials
A NIMS research team has demonstrated for the first time ever that a simple stack of thermoelectric and magnetic material layers can exhibit a substantially larger transverse thermoelectric ...
- Scientists discover huge magnetic toroids in the Milky Way halo
The origin and evolution of cosmic magnetic fields is a long-standing unsolved question at the frontier of astronomy and astrophysics research and has been selected as one of the key areas of ...
- Transforming common soft magnets into next-generation thermoelectric conversion materials with 3-minute heat treatment
A research team from NIMS and Nagoya University has demonstrated that an iron-based amorphous alloy, widely used as a soft magnetic material in transformers and motors, can be transformed into a ...
- Transforming common soft magnets into a next-generation thermoelectric conversion materials by 3 minutes heat treatment
A research team from NIMS and Nagoya University has demonstrated that an iron-based amorphous alloy, widely used as a soft magnetic material in transformers and motors, can be transformed into a ...
- Magnetic properties and materials articles from across Nature Portfolio
A quantum critical Bose gas of magnons in the quasi-two-dimensional antiferromagnet YbCl 3 under magnetic fields Some ... depend on material nonlinearities for their function, which can be hard ...
Go deeper with Google Headlines on:
Elasto-magnetic material
[google_news title=”” keyword=”elasto-magnetic material” num_posts=”5″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]