Engineers at MIT have discovered how to create materials that are not only incredibly strong but also surprisingly stretchy, debunking the common understanding that making a material stiffer compromises its flexibility.

The secret is on the structure of the material, more than what it's made of. The team used plexiglass-like polymer and printed the material using a double-network design inspired by hydrogels. This approach combines microscopic stiff struts with soft interwoven springs or coils. 

Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor at MIT, said:

"We are opening up this new territory for metamaterials. You could print a double-network metal or ceramic, and you could get a lot of these benefits, in that it would take more energy to break them, and they would be significantly more stretchable."

The result is a metamaterial that can stretch over four times its length without breaking. The struts provide the strength the material needs, while the interwoven springs or coils absorb stress and prevent an initial crack from tearing the material. 

The team also discovered that adding small holes or defects to the material, which usually weakens structures, actually made it even stronger. 

James Utama Surjadi, the study's first author, said:  

"You might think this makes the material worse. But we saw once we started adding defects, we doubled the amount of stretch we were able to do, and tripled the amount of energy that we dissipated. That gives us a material that's both stiff and tough, which is usually a contradiction."

Besides the development of this metamaterial, the team has also developed a computational framework that engineers can use to test a metamaterial's performance based on specific patterns of its stiff and stretchy networks.

Read the full article here learn more about the rigid and flexible metamaterial. 

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