A team of chemists from MIT and Duke University has discovered a counterintuitive way to make polymers stronger: introduce a few weaker bonds into the material.
Working with a type of polymer known as polyacrylate elastomers, the researchers found that they could increase the materials’ resistance to tearing up to tenfold, simply by using a weaker type of crosslinker to join some of the polymer building blocks.
These rubber-like polymers are commonly used in car parts, and they are also often used as the “ink” for 3D-printed objects. The researchers are now exploring the possible expansion of this approach to other types of materials, such as rubber tires.
“If you could make a rubber tire 10 times more resistant to tearing, that could have a dramatic impact on the lifetime of the tire and on the amount of microplastic waste that breaks off,” says Jeremiah Johnson, a professor of chemistry at MIT and one of the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: As this polymer network is stretched, weaker crosslinking bonds (blue) break more easily than any of the strong polymer strands, making it more difficult for a crack to propagate through the material. Credits: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News