Today's weaving of threads has already reached diameters of a few microns (wool, cotton, synthetic polymers, etc.), but scientists at the University of Manchester have gone further by developing the world's finest weave, surpassing the finest Egyptian linen .
This has been possible thanks to the development of a form of weaving molecular threads into two-dimensional layers.
10,000 times a human hair
To understand how fine this thread is, let's think about the number of threads in a fabric per inch (about 2.5 centimeters). If Egyptian linen has about 1,500 threads, This new fabric reaches about 50 million.
Each layer of molecular tissue is only 4 nanometers thick; that is 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. For the moment, that is. the largest piece of fabric made is only 1 mm in length.
To develop this fabric, metal atoms and negatively charged ions were used to interlock small molecular building blocks made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur atoms. The woven building blocks were eventually joined together like pieces of a jigsaw to form individual sheets of molecular strands woven into a fabric just 4 millionths of a millimeter thick (4 nanometers).
As explained David Leigh, main author of this development that has been published in a study in Nature:
This is the first example of a layered molecularly woven fabric. Weaving molecular strands offers a new way to alter the properties of plastics and other materials. The number of strands and strand crossings was measured by bright X-rays on the building blocks. The strands bend the path of X-rays through the material by a specific amount, allowing researchers to measure how many strands there are per inch. The measurement shows that the material has a thread count of 40-60 million threads per inch. In comparison, the finest Egyptian linen has a thread count of around 1,500.
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The news
This is the finest fabric in the world and has been created by weaving threads of individual molecules into threads.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.