Nanotechnology Now - News Story: Nanostructure will become design variable for materials engineers

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June 25th, 2007

Nanostructure will become design variable for materials engineers

Abstract:
Bone is one of the most fascinating materials that has evolved in nature. There are 206 bones in your body - did you know that a newborn has 350 bones but they fuse together as you grow? - more than half of them in your hands and feet. These bones not only protect your organs, support your body against gravity's pull and allow you to move but they also are living tissues that produce blood cells and store important minerals. Not only important for humans, bones are the essential part of the endoskeleton of all vertebrates. Bone is a composite material of the mineral calcium hydroxyapatite and tropocollagen molecules (the fragile and soluble form of collagen when first synthesized by fibroblasts). It forms an extremely tough, yet lightweight material and its properties and behavior are of great interest to scientists and materials engineers. For instance, very little is known about the fracture behavior of bone and all such studies have been conducted at scales much larger than the nanoscale that explicitly considers individual tropocollagen molecules and mineral particles. New research at MIT has discovered a previously unknown toughening mechanism of bone that operates at the nanoscale - the level of individual collagen molecules and nano-platelets of hydroxyapatite. This breakthrough work lays the foundation for new materials design that includes the nanostructure as a specific 'design variable' and may help engineers to design materials from the bottom up by including hierarchies as a design parameter.

Source:
nanowerk.com

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