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A hybrid material that reversibly switches between two stable solid states

Nature Materials volume 18, pages 874–882 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Most types of solid matter have a single stable solid state for a particular set of conditions. Nonetheless, materials with distinct, interchangeable solid states would be advantageous for several technological applications. Here, we describe a material composed of a polymer impregnated with a supercooled salt solution, termed as sal-gel, that assumes two distinct but stable and reversible solid states under the same conditions for a range of temperatures (−90 to 58 °C) and pressure. On transient stimulation of nucleation, the material switches from a clear and soft solid to a white and hard state, which can be 104 times stiffer than the original (15 kPa versus 385 MPa). This hard solid becomes soft again by transient heating, demonstrating the reversibility of the transition. This concept, exploiting the robust physical metastability of a liquid state, is extended to sugar alcohols, resulting in a stimuli-responsive and non-evaporating sug-gel. These ‘two-in-one’ solid materials may find potential uses in soft robotics and adhesive applications.

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Fig. 1: Material behaviours of sal-gel.
Fig. 2: Mechanical behaviours of sal-gel.
Fig. 3: Crystallization behaviour of sal-gel.
Fig. 4: Applications of sal-gel.
Fig. 5: Practical implications of sal-gel.

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Data availability

All the data supporting the findings of this study are within the Article and its Supplementary Information files and are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank M. Vlasea, F. Liravi, M. Salarian and H. Fayazfar from the Multi-Scale Additive Manufacturing Lab at the University of Waterloo, as well as A. Finkle (co-founder) and L. S. Young from Structur3D Printing (72 St Leger Street, Suite 315, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada) for their support and consultations on additive manufacturing. We would also like to thank R. Messier and S. Messier from Living Aquarium (652 Bishop Street North, Cambridge, Ontario, Canada) for providing the living sea cucumber for photography. We would also like to thank J. Vandenberg, L. Chen, C. Zhang, P. Si and Z. Shi for proofreading. We are grateful to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for the financial support of this project (grant no. RGPIN-2014-04663).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Li Yu

    Present address: Hubei Collaborative Innovation Center for Advanced Organic Chemical Materials, Key Laboratory for the Green Preparation and Application of Functional Materials, Ministry of Education, Hubei Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hubei University, Wuhan, China

  2. These authors contributed equally: Fut (Kuo) Yang, Aleksander Cholewinski.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, Institute for Polymer Research, Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Fut (Kuo) Yang, Aleksander Cholewinski, Li Yu, Geoffrey Rivers & Boxin Zhao

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Contributions

F.Y. conceived the idea and refined it with the help of A.C. F.Y. and A.C. designed and performed the experiments. F.Y., A.C. and B.Z. analysed and interpreted the results. L.Y. provided consultation and critical feedback on the manuscript. G.R. performed early mechanical measurements and additive manufacturing. F.Y., A.C. and B.Z. wrote the manuscript. B.Z. supervised and directed the research.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Fut (Kuo) Yang or Boxin Zhao.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Video legends 1–7, Notes 1–9, Table 1, Figs. 1–4 and refs. 1–26.

Supplementary Video 1

Freezing and melting of sal-gel.

Supplementary Video 2

Sal-gel properties at the rigid state.

Supplementary Video 3

Stability of sal-gel.

Supplementary Video 4

Soft-to-hard transitional contact of sal-gel.

Supplementary Video 5

Sal-gel instant and robust self-adhesion.

Supplementary Video 6

Smart sal-gel-based construct.

Supplementary Video 7

Three-dimensional doodling of sal-gel sea cucumber.

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Yang, F.(., Cholewinski, A., Yu, L. et al. A hybrid material that reversibly switches between two stable solid states. Nat. Mater. 18, 874–882 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0434-0

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