Stand aside Kevlar and Dyneema: researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a process to create ultra-fine nano-fibres that exceed all other high-performance composites for strength and toughness. Applications for the super-material abound, says MIT Professor Gregory Rutledge, including many not yet conceived.

 

The MIT scientists have developed a process that can produce ultrafine fibres – whose diameter is measured in nano-metres (billionths of a metre) – that are exceptionally strong and tough. Such fibres, which should prove inexpensive and easy to produce, could be choice materials for many applications, such as protective armour and high-performance nano-composites.

 

The new process, called ‘gel electrospinning’, is described in a paper by MIT Professor of Chemical Engineering, Gregory Rutledge, and postdoc Jay Park. The paper appears online and will be published in the the Journal of Materials Science, February 2018 edition.

 

Eliminating “trade-offs”

 

In materials science, Rutledge explains, “there are a lot of trade-offs”. Typically researchers can enhance one characteristic of a material but will see a decline in a different characteristic. “Strength and toughness are a pair like that: Usually when you get high strength, you lose something in the toughness,” he says. “The material becomes more brittle and therefore doesn’t have the mechanism for absorbing energy, and it tends to break.” Yet in a surprising discovery, in the fibres made under the new process, many of those trade-offs are actually eliminated.

 

“It’s a big deal when you get a material that has very high strength and high toughness,” Rutledge says. That’s the case with this process, which uses a variation of a traditional method called gel spinning but adds electrical forces. The results are ultrafine fibres of polyethylene that match or exceed the properties of some of the strongest fibre materials, such as Kevlar and Dyneema, which are used for applications including bullet-stopping body armour.

 

“We started off with a mission to make fibres in a different size range, namely below one micron [one-millionth of a metre], because those have a variety of interesting features in their own right,” Rutledge informs. “And we’ve looked at such ultrafine fibres – sometimes called nano-fibres – for many years. But there was nothing in what would be called the high-performance fibre range.” High-performance fibres, which include aramids such as Kevlar, and gel-spun polyethylenes like Dyneema and Spectra, are also used in ropes for extreme uses, and as reinforcing fibres in some high-performance composites.

 

“There hasn’t been a whole lot new happening in that field in many years, because they have very top-performing fibres in that mechanical space,” Rutledge says, who adds that this new material exceeds all the others. “What really sets those apart is what we call specific modulus and specific strength, which means that on a per-weight basis they outperform just about everything.” The term ‘modulus’ refers to how stiff a fibre is, or how much it resists being stretched.

 

Outperforming others, pound for pound

 

Compared to carbon fibres and ceramic fibres, which are widely used in composite materials, the new gel-electrospun polyethylene fibres have similar degrees of strength but are much tougher and have lower density. That means that, pound for pound, they outperform the standard materials by a wide margin, Rutledge says.

 

In creating this ultrafine material, the team had aimed just to match the properties of existing microfibers – “So, demonstrating that would have been a nice accomplishment for us,” Rutledge says. But in fact, the material turned out to be better in significant ways. While the test materials had a modulus not quite as good as the best existing fibres, they were quite close — enough to be “competitive,” he notes. Crucially, he adds: “the strengths are about a factor of two better than the commercial materials and comparable to the best available academic materials. And their toughness is about an order of magnitude better.”

 

Spin-doctors 

 

The researchers are still investigating what accounts for this impressive performance. “It seems to be something that we received as a gift – with the reduction in fibre size – that we were not expecting,” Rutledge says.

 

“Most plastics are tough, but they’re not as stiff and strong as what we’re getting,” he explains. Meanwhile, glass fibres are stiff but not very strong, and steel wire is strong but not very stiff. Amazingly, the new gel-electrospun fibres seem to combine the desirable qualities of strength, stiffness, and toughness in ways that have few equals.

 

Using the gel electro-spinning process is, Rutledge advises, essentially very similar to the conventional [gel spinning] process in terms of the materials required. However, because the process requires the use of “electrical forces” and using a single-stage process rather than the multiple stages of the conventional process, the MIT researchers are able to get “much more highly drawn fibres” with diameters of a few hundred nano-metres rather than the typical 15 micro-metres, he says. The researchers’ process combines the use of a polymer gel as the starting material, as in gel-spun fibres, but uses electrical forces rather than mechanical pulling to draw the fibres out; the charged fibres induce a “whipping” instability process that produces their ultrafine dimensions. And those narrow dimensions, it turns out, are what led to the unique properties of the fibres.

 

Light-weighted for the battlefield and beyond

 

These results might lead to protective materials that are as strong as existing ones but less bulky, making them more practical for armour on the battlefield, for example. Yet Rutledge adds that such ultra-fine nano-fibres “may have applications we haven’t thought about yet, because we’ve just now learned that they have this level of toughness.”

 

The research was supported by the U.S. Army through the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and by the National Science Foundation’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering.