This is far
from the days of making a bad guess and attempting to design an experiment to
illuminate the guess. We are now able to
actually see the behaviors setting up before generating the result.
This surely
means that we will refine our working knowledge of material fabrication with a
theoretical basis of high confidence.
The challenges ahead will need that ability. We are approaching the need to fabricate
skins a few atomic layers at a time whose behavior must be managed. This is another such step and is important
for that.
Most
important for now we have actually seen the behavior.
Man-made
muscle fibers help scientists understand strain on plastics
By Ben
Coxworth
21:14 December 23, 2010
Scientists have used biosynthetic muscle fibers to observe
the changes that polymers exhibit when subjected to mechanical stress (Image:
TUM)
Scientists
tasked with creating better plastic films have been at a loss when it comes to
observing how synthetic polymers react under mechanical stress – the polymers
are just too small for a microscope to keep track of while being stretched. Now
a team of physicists from Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) has come up
with a solution.
They’re
using a muscle filament protein to build polymer networks that can be observed by a microscope,
and by doing so have already determined why some polymers get tougher with
repeated stress, while others get softer.
Prof.
Andreas Bausch and his colleagues are utilizing the protein actin to create the
biosynthetic networks, as actin filaments are easily seen through a
fluorescence microscope – even when they’re moving while being stretched. By
combining a rheometer (used to study mechanical properties of materials) and a
confocal microscope, they were able to film the actin network in three dimensions
throughout the mechanical deformation process.
According
to the TUM team, the
fashion in which the network structure reorganizes itself lies behind the
difference in stress responses of different plastic polymers.
The research was recently
published in the journal Nature Communications.
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