A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has engineered a new rubber-like solid substance with surprising qualities: it can absorb and release very large quantities of energy and it is programmable.
The new material holds great promise for a wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without using additional energy to new helmets and protective materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly.
Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author, said: “Imagine a rubber band. You pull it back and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go, it flies for a mile.”
This hypothetical rubber band is made out of a new metamaterial – a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally...