August 30, 2025
By examining mushrooms under microscopes, engineers can develop stronger materials
Uncategorized

By examining mushrooms under microscopes, engineers can develop stronger materials

Take a button mushroom from the supermarket and it presses slightly between your fingers. Grab a woody mushroom mushroom from a tree trunk and you will have difficulty breaking it. Both extremes grow out of the same microscopic building blocks: hyphen-hair-dünne tubes, which were mainly made from the natural polymerchitin, a hard connection that can also be found in crab shells.

While these tubes branch and weave, they form a light but surprisingly strong network called Mycel. The engineers begin to examine this network for use in environmentally friendly materials.

However, even within a single mushroom family, the strength of a myzele network can vary greatly. Scientists have long suspected that the way the hyphen is arranged – not only what they are made of – from understanding and ultimately to understand the key to understanding and ultimately. Until recently, measurements that directly link the microscopic arrangement directly with the macroscopic strength were scarce.

I am a mechanical engineering, Ph.D. Student at Binghamton University that studies bio-inspired structures. In our latest research, my colleagues and I asked a simple question: Can we correct the strength of a mushroom -like material by changing the angle of its filaments without adding harder ingredients? The answer, as it turns out, is.

2 edible species, many tiny tests

In our study, my team compared two well -known mushrooms. The first was the white button mushroom, the fabric of which only uses thin filaments, which are called generative filaments. The second was the Maitake, also called Hen-of-the-Woods, whose tissue mixes in a second, thicker type of hyphae, which was referred to as skeletal filaments. These skeletal files are arranged approximately in parallel like cable bundles.

A diagram that shows two electron microscope pictures with long, thin filaments. On the right, the filaments are arranged in parallel.

The two types of mushrooms used in the study: The white button mushroom is monomitically and on the left, which means that it has only one kind of hyphen. The maitake is displayed on the right and dimitically, which means that it has two types of hyphen. Mohamed Khalil Elhachimi

After we had gently dried the caps and stems to remove any water that softened the material and distorted the results, we zoomed in with scanning electron microscopes and tested the samples on two very different scales.

First we tested the compression of the macarma dance. A motor-driven piston slowly pressed every mushroom, while the sensors found how hard the rehearsal was pushed back-in which a marshmallow, only with laboratory precision, could squeeze together.

Then we pressed a thinner diamond tip as a human hair in individual filaments to measure their stiffness.

The white mushroom filaments behaved like rubber bands with an average of 18 megapascals in stiffness – similar to natural rubber. The thicker skeletal files in Maitake measure about 560 megapascals, more than 30 times stiffer and approached the stiffness of polyethylene with high dense plastic, which is used in cutting boards and a few water pipes.

Two mushroom photos, the left is a mushroom mushroom with lots of attached leafy structures. The right are button mushrooms that are spherical caps with conical stems.

But chemistry is only half of the story. When we pressed entire pieces, the direction we pressed was even more for the Maitake. Pressing the parallel skeletal files made the block 30 times stiffer than pressing over the grain. In contrast, the confused filaments in white mushrooms felt just as soft from every angle.

A digital mushroom and twist the threads

In order to separate the geometry from chemistry, we have converted snapshots from the microscope with a 3D voronoi network into a computer model -a pattern that imitates the walls between bubbles in a foam. Think of ping pong balls that have come in a box: every ball is a cell, and the walls between the cells become our simulated filaments.

We assigned these filaments according to the rigid stiffness values measured in the laboratory and then turned the entire network practically to angle of 0 degrees, 30 degrees, 90 degrees and completely random.

Horizontal (0 degrees) Filaments are curved like a spring mattress. Vertical (90 degrees) Filaments supported the weight almost as tight as dense wood. The simple tipping of the network to 60 degrees almost doubled its stiffness compared to 0 degrees, without changing a single chemical component.

A diagram that shows five fiber arrangements in which the fibers are inclined to different degrees.

The researchers modeled structures with different fiber orientations to determine which are strongest: (a) a horizontal fiber orientation, (b) a fiber orientation of 30 degrees, (c) a 60-degree fiber orientation, (d) a vertical fiber orientation and (e) a random fiber alignment. Mohamed Khalil Elhachimi

Basically, we found that orientation alone could transform a mushy sponge into something that is right for serious pressure. This indicates that manufacturers could produce strong, light, biodegradable parts such as shoe injection, protective packaging and even inner panels for cars by simply guiding how a fungus grows instead of mixing harder additives.

Greener materials – and beyond

Startups are already growing “leather” from Myzel – the thread -shaped mushroom network – for handbags and mycelium foam as a styrofoam replacement.

The leadership of mushrooms of putting their filaments in strategic directions could bring the performance much higher and open the doors in sectors in which the ratio of strength to weight is king: think of sporting goods, building pension sticks or light fillers in aircraft plates.

The same digital tool kit also works for metal or polymer grilles printed layer by layer. Exchange the filament properties in the model, let the algorithm select the best angles and feed this layout into a 3D printer.

One day, engineers choose an app with the inscription: “I need a panel that is stiff to south-south, but is flexible east-west”, and the program could spit out a filament card inspired by the modest may-be.

Our next step is to put thousands of these virtual networks into a mechanical learning model so that it can predict or even invent filamentlayouts that hit targeted rigidity in every direction.

In the meantime, biologists examine low -energy paths to persuade real mushrooms to grow in decent rows, from nutrients to a side of a petri dish to the use of gentle electrical fields that encourage filaments to align.

This study taught us that they do not always need exotic chemistry to make better material. Sometimes it’s about how to align the same old threads – just ask a mushroom.

This article will be released from the conversation, a non -profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and trustworthy analyzes to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Mohamed Khalil Elhachimi, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Read more:

Mohamed Khalil Elhachimi does not work for a company or an organization that benefits from this article and have not published any relevant affiliations about their academic appointment, not for a company or an organization that benefits from this article.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *