Metal Rubber

Reported April 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Portable gadgets were meant to be taken on the move. Portable also means accidents and damage can happen. Now, imagine electronics that can take a beating and bounce back! It's soon possible with a shocking new flexible, indestructible material, called metal rubber.

"You can heat it. You can freeze it. You can stretch it. You can douse it with jet fuel," Jennifer Lalli, Ph.D., a polymer chemist at NanoSonic, Inc., in Blacksburg, Va., tells Ivanhoe.

Abuse it, and metal rubber snaps back to its original shape. But the best part of this rubbery material? It conducts electricity just like metal and is also lightweight.

To make metal rubber, chemists and engineers use a process called self-assembly. The material is repeatedly dipped into positively charged and negatively charged solutions. The positive and negative charges bond, forming layers that conduct electricity.

"Electricity flows through metal rubber because there are little metal particles, and the electricity flows from little metal particle, to little metal particle, to little metal particle, between the two ends just like a piece of copper metal," Rick Claus, Ph.D., a NanoSonic electrical engineer, tells Ivanhoe.

The self-assembly process coats almost anything -- even fabric can be made to carry electrical power. Dr. Lalli says you can wash the metal rubber textiles and they maintain electrical current.

Scientists are looking into uses of metal rubber like bendy, electrically charged aircraft wings and artificial muscles -- and wearable computers. Abuse-resistant, flexible circuits, like cell phones, are still years away, but the future looks bright -- and powerful -- for bendable products.

The Materials Research Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

NanoSonic
Blacksburg, Va. 24060
(540) 953-1785
info@nanosonic.com

Materials Research Society
Warrendale, PA 15086-7573
(724) 779-3003
webmaster@mrs.org

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