New ultra-thin, ultra-light nanomaterial 1,000 times thinner than paper

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According to news on December 21, at present, American scientists have newly developed an ultra-thin and ultra-light nanomaterial, which is 1,000 times thinner than paper and weighs only 0.1 grams per square meter. In the future, it can be applied to innovative material design, and even Aircraft industry.

At present, a team of scientists has recently developed a new type of material, which is a thousand times thinner than paper, but strong enough that it will not change its structure even if it is bent. The tiny flakes of material are made of aluminum oxide and, first of all, the material can be manipulated by hand, despite being a nanoscale material.

This ultra-thin material could be used in the aerospace field, and even promote the rapid development of insect flying robots. Scientists conducted years of research to finally design the thinnest and lightest material. Currently, the designers of the material are researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

Igor Bargatin, the project leader and an associate professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said that previous scientists have designed nanoscale materials that are strong, but they have been difficult to apply to macroscopic scales. . Our ultimate goal is to create a free-standing thin layer of nanometer-scale material, but at a scale large enough to be manipulated manually, which has not been possible before.

Normally, a material as thin as this is bent and twisted and loses its original structural characteristics. A Nobel laureate’s graphene material, which can be as thin as a single carbon atom but must be stretched over canvas to form a framework to avoid curling, can return to its original structure without any outside help. But it also has a problem. Due to its heavy mass, it is difficult to apply to low-quality ultra-thin film designs.

In contrast, the newly developed ultra-thin material uses a corrugated structure instead of a frame structure, which means that it will not be “completely planar”, but a three-dimensional structure similar to a honeycomb. Layers, continuity and full freestanding character.

It’s like an egg carton, but on the nanoscale, stressed Associate Professor Prashant Purohit, a member of the research team and an associate professor in Penn’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. This aluminum oxide thin layer material is between 25-100 nanometers thick and is stacked together at the atomic layer level.

Balgatin explained that aluminum oxide is actually a ceramic material, which people would think would be very easy to crack, but to the researchers’ surprise, it did not. The way the material bends, twists and regains its structure, you might think it’s made of plastic. When I first saw it, it was hard to believe it was real, the thin layers of the honeycomb structure made it more rigid, preventing it from folding on itself or getting stuck in something. If the material develops cracks, they do not extend throughout the structure, and the cracks stop spreading when they enter the vertical corrugated walls.

According to Keivan Davami, a member of the research team, insect wings are only a few microns thick, and their size is limited by the thickness of the cells. The artificial wing material is 10 times thinner.