The future body armors may just be made with hair. Yup, hair.
There’s a new study by researchers from the University of California San Diego investigating the strength and resistance of hair to breaking.
It was found that hair has a strength to weight ratio comparable to steel, meaning that it could be stretched up to one and a half time its original length before breaking.
Yang (Daniel) Yu, the first author of the study and a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego says that the team behind this analysis want to understand the mechanism behind the extraordinary property. They are looking at the material to develop body armor and further help understand the intricacies of hair care products.
Source: Bad Girls Club
Marc Meyers, lead author of the study and a Jacobs School of Engineering mechanical engineering professor, shares that nature creates a variety of interesting materials and architectures in very ingenious ways.
He adds, “We’re interested in understanding the correlation between the structure and the properties of biological materials to develop synthetic materials and designs—based on nature—that have better performance than existing ones.”
Details into the study published in the journal Materials Science and Engineering C revealed that the human hair behaves differently when it is deformed or stretched. This was discovered on a nanoscale level.
Meyers explains, “Think of a highly viscous substance like honey. If you deform it fast it becomes stiff, but if you deform it slowly it readily pours,” referring to the relationship of the speed of stretching the hair and its strength.
Yu tells what gives hair the ability to withstand high stress and strain: the combination that happens between the two mains part of the hair, which are the cortex and the matrix. The latter is sensitive to the speed at which hair is deformed, while the former is not.
Furthermore, the researchers revealed that the structure of the hair changes upon stretching it. It is all inside the cortex where the strength, or the resistance to breaking, comes from.
Don’t be conclusive just yet: this is partially reversible. Upon stretching the hair under a small amount of strain, it could recover its original shape until such time that the structural reformation, as what they call it, becomes irreversible.
“This is the first time evidence for this transformation has been discovered,” Yu shares.
Several tests further involved properties like humidity levels, temperatures, and water.
Source: Phys.org
