Creating shape-shifting ceramics (IMAGE)

University of Minnesota

Creating shape-shifting ceramics

Caption

Creating shape-shifting materials is not an easy process. It involves a delicate tuning of the distances between atoms by compositional changes, so that the two phases fit together well. This diagram shows what happened when researchers implemented this recipe with one sample of ceramic material. Instead of improving the deformability of the ceramic, they observed that some specimens gradually fell apart into a pile of powder, a phenomenon they termed “weeping.”

Credit

Gu, et al., University of Minnesota and Kiel University

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