The Chinese Academy of Sciences team imitates shells to develop new materials

Plastic products can bring convenience to people's lives, but plastic products made of hard-to-degrade plastic raw materials, the plastic waste formed after their use, will often have an adverse impact on the natural ecology
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Therefore, seeking biodegradable materials to replace traditional plastic products has become an important development direction for plastic chemical production
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? Recently, the team of Academician Yu Shuhong of the University of Science and Technology of China, inspired by natural shells, has developed a new type of thin film material that far exceeds the mechanical and optical properties of traditional plastics in terms of strength, toughness, and light transmittance.
Moreover, it can be degraded without pollution after being buried in the soil for about two months, or it is expected to become an ideal material in fields such as flexible electronic devices
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? Shell is a kind of natural material with excellent performance, which is made of "brick-mud" structure layer by layer "wall-building"
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Recently, academician Yu Shuhong’s team successfully constructed a “brick-fiber” shell-like layered structure using two natural components of nano-clay flakes and bacterial cellulose, and developed a high-performance composite using aerosol-assisted biosynthesis.
Film material
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? "In simple terms, bacterial cellulose is a substance secreted by bacteria after'eating' glucose, which is thin and long like a rope
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" said Guan Qingfang, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Science and Technology of China, a member of the scientific research team, and then combined it with The combination of flake-shaped clay is like "bundling layers of bricks with a rope net" to form a new material with strong performance
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? Experiments show that the strength of this new type of film material reaches 482 MPa, which is more than 6 times the current commonly used commercial plastic film
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It has good flexibility and can be folded into various shapes without obvious damage after unfolding
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This new material also has excellent light transmittance, achieving high transparency of more than 73% and high optical haze of more than 80% in the visible light range of the human eye
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? "Similar to the effect of ground glass, it not only allows light to penetrate but does not dazzle the eyes.
This kind of'homogeneity' is very important for making mobile phone screens and other devices
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" Guan Qingfang
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? Traditional plastic film is very easy to soften and deform at high temperature.
In contrast, this new material has excellent thermal stability.
When the temperature changes by 100 degrees Celsius, its size change is only three ten thousandths, and it can still be used in an environment of 250 degrees Celsius.
Keep the structure and performance stable
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More importantly, the unique raw material composition makes this new material green and pollution-free throughout its life cycle.
Bacterial cellulose will degrade naturally in the soil in about two months
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? Recently, the academic journal "Substance" under the "Cell" Publishing Group published the research results
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It is understood that due to the advantages of high performance, low cost, and simple process, this new material is very competitive in the fields of flexible electronic devices, new displays, and photoelectric conversion
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At present, the scientific research team is actively promoting application and industrialization
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We can look forward to the industrialization and marketization of this new material, adding more environmentally friendly material choices to electronics manufacturing
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