A research team at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada, has demonstrated a fabric designed using additive manufacturing which they claim can absorb up to 96 per cent of impact energy without breaking. This could lead to the creation of unbreakable plastic coverings for all sorts of delicate technology devices.
Professors Frédérick Gosselin and Daniel Therriault, from Polytechnique Montréal's Department of Mechanical Engineering, along with doctoral student Shibo Zou, have demonstrated how plastic webbing could be incorporated into a glass pane to prevent it from shattering on impact.
Their design was inspired by the amazing properties of natural spider webs. "A spider web can resist the impact of an insect colliding with it, due to its capacity to deform via sacrificial links at the molecular level, within silk proteins themselves," said Professor Gosselin. "We were inspired by this property in our approach."
The researchers used polycarbonate...