Plastic skyscrapers? Plastic airplanes?

[John Clark]

In yesterday's issue of the journal Nature there is a report of a new super strong plastic called 2DPA-1 that is 5 times more resistant to deformation than bulletproof glass and requires twice as much force to break as steel even though it only has 1/6 the density. This remarkable strength could be achieved because chemists found an easy way to polymerize molecules in just two dimensions, something that had been thought impossible, so they can cheaply make sheets of this stuff and then stack the sheets together to make it as thick as they want. As a bonus, unlike most plastics 2DPA-1 is impermeable to gases so it can also be used as a thin coating to protect other materials from oxidation.

Irreversible synthesis of an ultrastrong two-dimensional polymeric material

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

pss

[Lawrence Crowell]

The biggest problem I might see is that plastic is a sort of growing pollution problem. Though that is mostly with single use disposable plastic items, something like this will increase the planetary load of synthetic chemicals on the environment.

LC