Science Daily December 20, 2019
A team of researchers in the US (University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania) has shown that aging encodes a memory of the stresses imposed during preparation. Because of inhomogeneous local stresses, the material itself decides how to evolve by modifying stressed regions differently from those under less stress. Because material evolution occurs in response to stresses, aging can be “directed” to produce sought-after responses and unusual functionalities that do not inherently exist. Aging obeys a natural “greedy algorithm” as, at each instant, the material simply follows the path of most rapid and accessible relaxation. Their experiments and simulations illustrate directed aging in examples in which the material’s elasticity transforms as desired because of an imposed deformation…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE