Designing and creating materials with innovative properties

摘要

Granular materials - assemblages of particles that range broadly from powders to sand to microscopic beads of glass - are one of the least understood forms of matter due to the incredibly complex ways that those particles interact. But those complicated physics also offer tantalising potential to create materials with novel properties - like the ability to absorb impact energy in customised ways. In a paper published May 13 in Physical Review Letters, University of Washington mechanical engineers have for the first time observed and analysed collective interparticle vibrations in two-dimensional microscale granular crystals - a type of designer granular material.