Dive Brief:

• Materials scientists and engineers at MIT say a new way to understand why the bonds in bonded materials sometimes fail is the first step to prevent it in a newly published paper.
• The breakthrough was studying the bonds at the molecular level to see how moisture that penetrates bonds introduces new molecules and changes the system, thus creating a weak link between two highly durable materials in products such as fiber-reinforced polymers or reinforced concrete, one of the authors, Oral Buyukozturk, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, said.
• "Moisture is the No. 1 enemy," Buyukozturk said, which the team learned through a combination of models based on principles that say how molecules should interact and lab tests to validate the models.

Dive Insight:

The discovery will have wide applicability, the researchers said, because bonded materials are ubiquitous, including in airplanes. It's now possible to make quantitative predictions about how bonds will behave, or fail, under specific conditions. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.