THE Awards 2024 - Research Project of the Year: STEM

A project from the Soft Matter Group at the University of Leeds has been shortlisted for the ‘Research Project of the Year:STEM’ in the 20th Times Higher Education Awards 2024.  Professor Helen Gleeson, Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Leeds School of Physics and Astronomy and researcher Dr Devesh Mistry discovered the new material when exploring the mechanical behaviour of liquid crystal elastomers. It is the world’s first synthetic material that is auxetic at the molecular level, and its unintuitive properties mean it expands under strain. In 2023 Helen and her team deduced how it works and developed design rules for a whole family of these novel materials. 

Auxeticity – when a material becomes thicker rather than thinner when stretched – can be seen in places like a human Achilles tendon and cat skin. It can give materials an advantage when it comes to absorbing shock, as well as resisting fractures and tears. That makes these materials promising in applications that require durability and robustness, such as electronic screens, glass for buildings and vehicles, and extending the efficiency and lifetime of wind turbine blades that suffer erosion due to raindrop impact.  

The world-class research from Helen and the team is currently being developed further, with new levels of understanding and materials development, aiming to make potential uses for the materials a reality. The materials have been covered by patents exclusively licensed to Auxetec, a spin out company formed to exploit these remarkable materials.  

More information can be found at the following links. 

Spinout company website: https://auxetec.co.uk/ 

Physics World article: https://physicsworld.com/a/new-auxetic-material-stretches-the-limits/  

Coincident molecular auxeticity and negative order parameter in a liquid crystal elastomer, Nature Communications, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07587-y (December 2018) 

This is the paper where we first report our discovery of the remarkable family of materials that are auxetic at a molecular level. 

Understanding the physics of the auxetic response in a liquid crystal elastomer, Physical Review Research (June 2021) 

https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.023191 

This paper was where we first suggested the physical mechanism behind the auxetic response of liquid crystal elastomers.  

Direct Observation of Biaxial Nematic Order in Auxetic Liquid Crystal Elastomers, Materials (2023) 

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/16/1/393 

This is the paper where we confirm the mechanism by which the materials become thicker when stretched, rather than thinner. Essentially, we show that molecules rotate ‘out of plane’, causing an increase in thickness beyond a material-dependent strain threshold.