Rubber Meets Road ~ Materials & Transportation

MITWorld posts Professor Krystyn Van Vliet's talk Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Why Chemomechanical Design of Materials is Critical to Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure. About the pace of innovation, she asks...

"Since the materials are used in such large volumes why has there been relatively so little innovation in them? The main reason is that the materials are inexpensive. Because of their low cost, cost is not a strong driving factor." But, she says, "New approaches over the past few years allow us to innovate at the level of the nanoscale and provide high impact change"