I'm very excited to announce that a new publication I’m proud to have been a part of has been released today in Nature Materials. The work is "A hybrid material that reversibly switches between two stable solid states", a fantastic materials concept study. I was very happy to collaborate with the lead authors, Fut Kuo Yang and Aleksander Cholewinski, and to contribute my ideas and characterisation experience as they championed this new class of functional material. Our article can be found through the following link: Read-Only PDF presented by Nature.com: https://rdcu.be/bLilY

In this work, a new class of sol-gel composite was designed from the bottom-up, employing a cross-linked polymer gel and sodium acetate: a salt with a low melting point and the ability to be super-cooled, colloquially known as “Hot Ice”. The polymer was selected and optimised to maximize the positive association between the salt and the polymer, resulting in a networked sol-gel that uses the salt as an ideal solvent. This results in a Sal-Gel: a new material that combines the phase-change properties of Hot Ice with the shape-maintaining properties of the polymer gel, achieving a material that can undergo a reversible change between two solid states that differ in stiffness by five orders of magnitude. This concept was then shown to be generalizable to other systems, applying the same design methods to arrive at another new combination: “sug-gel”. This demonstrates that this new concept is not limited to a single material combination, and in the future can be further engineered and optimised, leading to a family of functional, printable, property-shifting materials.