US Creates Strongest-Ever Armor Material With 100 Trillion Bonds Per Cm²
18th January 2025
research team led by scientists at Northwestern University has developed the first-ever two-dimensional mechanically interlocked material with high flexibility and strength. In the future, this could be used to develop lightweight yet high-performance body armor and other such tough materials, a press release said.
It was in the 1980s that Fraser Stoddart, then a chemist at Northwestern University, first introduced the concept of mechanical bonds. Stoddart then expanded the role of these bonds into molecular machines by enabling functions like switching, rotating, contracting, and expanding in multiple ways and using them to develop interlocked structures, which also won him the Nobel Prize in 2016.
Researchers have been working on developing mechanically interlocked molecules with polymers for decades but have failed. “In organic chemistry, it is pretty straightforward to form so-called “medium-sized rings” that are 5-8 atoms around. But such rings are too small to thread another molecule through them,” explained William Dichtel, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University in an email to Interesting Engineering.