GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Toughest Material Ever Is Stronger than Kevlar, Stainless Steel

Rebecca Kutzer-Rice | Date: 10-27-10 | Comments

Stronger than stainless steel and even Kevlar, a new nanomaterial is lightweight and inexpensive. Possible applications range from reinforced steel to lightweight body armor and bulletproof glass.

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Toughest Material Ever Is Stronger than Kevlar, Stainless Steel
A few months ago, we wrote about a high-tech exoskeleton that could be used by soldiers carrying heavy loads. Now, a new extremely strong, lightweight material could vastly improve that skeleton. A team of Israeli scientists has created a printable nanomaterial that boasts not only the toughest organic structure known to man, but also is lightweight and inexpensive to produce.

Created by scientists at Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, the new material is made up of millions of microscopic nanospheres. The spheres are self-assembled from N-tert-butoxycarbonyl (Boc)-protected diphenylalanine molecules. In their unprotected form, these molecules form the plaquelike substance in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

The tiny nanospheres range in size from 80 nanometers to just 2 microns�that's 40 times smaller that the diameter of a human hair. When assembled, the spheres become tougher than any other organic substance, even bullet-proof Kevlar.

The tiny nanospheres range from 80 nanometers to just 2 microns. Despite their size, when assembled, the spheres form the toughest organic structure known to man.

"When we applied force to measure these particles, diamond probes were the only thing that actually made an indentation," said Itay Rousso from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. "It's quite astonishing that you can get such a strong material made of biological ingredients."

The scientists suspect that the new material works in a similar way to Kevlar. They theorize that the strength comes from the molecules' planar form, as well as various electron interactions.

"It's an open question, what gives rise to these extreme mechanical properties, but the spheres are very highly ordered," Rousso said.

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