Borrowing from pastry chefs, engineers create nanolayered composites
Adapting an old trick used for centuries by both metalsmiths and pastry makers, a team of researchers at MIT has found a way to efficiently create composite materials containing hundreds of layers that are just atoms thick but span the full width of the material. The discovery could open up wide-ranging possibilities for designing new, easy-to-manufacture composites for optical devices, electronic systems, and high-tech materials. The work is described this week in a paper in Science by Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor in Chemical Engineering; postdoc Pingwei Liu; and 11 other MIT students, postdocs, and professors. Materials such as graphene, a two-dimensional form of pure carbon, and carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders that are essentially rolled-up graphene, are “some of the strongest, hardest materials we have available,” says Strano, because their atoms are held together entirely by carbon-carbon bonds, which are “the strongest nature gives us” for chemical bonds to work...