The Memory of a Material
March 31, 2010
www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20100331/Note1.asp
Author Unknown
Nafion is a material that has been around since the sixties, and don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of it or you would have a bigger vocabulary than Microsoft Word 2007.It was creates by a chemist at DuPont and it is commonly used in fuel cells. And now, half a century after it was made, a scientist in Michigan has discovered a new quality, its Nafion’s memory. You see Tao Xie, the scientist behind the experiment has found that if you heat Nafion up, it will stay exactly the same size and shape. But if you heat it up again and this time twist it into a weird shape and you let it cool until it’s the shape you started with, then heat it up to the temperature of the last try it will become the shape that you twisted the last time. You can make shapes at different temperatures, heat it up, and as you let it cool down and it reaches each temperature, it will bend into the exact some shape that you made last time at that temperature. This shows that Nafion is a smart material which have special properties like generating electricity when pressure is applied or changing color according to the pressure of the room. Nafion isn’t the first of its kind, but is special because it’s the first of its kind that hasn’t been specially made for this unlike the other of its kind.
I think this article is really interesting! We could probably use it for a lot of new inventions, and it would probably greatly improve life by making things easier for us. I was just wondering, though, whether scientists have actually been applying this material to any current inventions?
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