A group of physicists from the University of Chile and the Catholic University of Chile collaborated to create materials with extraordinary properties that can be used in engineering and clothing design using 3D printers.
Chilean scientists managed to formulate a law that establishes how auxetic materials behave from physics. These materials belong to a group of components that have behaviors that escape logic.
For example “those that when stretched, instead of becoming thinner, as it usually happens, expand and become thickerbut when you compress them, they get thinner,” he says. the notice.
Formulating a law that determines exactly how these components behave has not been possible until now. “We established a general law that allows us to better understand these materials and create new types as well.“, says Daniel Acuña, a researcher at the FCFM Physics Department of the University of Chile.
And it is that these materials have various applications, since they can be used in engineering, medicine and even in innovative fashion. Acuña explains some examples of what might be achieved with them.
“We would have new hulls or bumpers, which withstand a greater impact. In medicine, new heart patches with much more flexibility. You might even create small robots or clothes that fit better to the body measurement, ”she commented.
The new law of physics created by Chilean scientists
Specific, What the results of this study achieved is that the auxetic property can be integrated into any modern material.thus generating new functionalities.
“During a year of work, the team used resin 3D printing of the designs along with finite element simulations and numerical simulations to determine the laws that govern these materials,” they report.
What would follow now, is to engineer new applications and forms for auxetic materials. This through 3D structures that can be used in industry and finally in daily life.
the paper, was published in the magazine Communications Physicsof Nature. Álvaro Nuñez, director of the FCFM Physics Department, and Francisco Gutiérrez, a master’s student, also participated.
They are joined by Rodrigo Silva, researcher; Humberto Palza; director of the Millennium Nucleus of Metamaterials and academic of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Biotechnology and Materials of the FCFM; and Gustavo During, from the Physics Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
