Question

What are Soft and Hard materials? Give example

Answer 1

Hard materials:

• Hard materials are those that cannot be crushed, cut, distorted, or scraped readily.
• Glass and iron are two examples.
• The hardness of a substance is dictated by its crystalline structure, which is regular and frequently quite "tight."
• This is true for diamonds, glass, and other hard materials.
• Steel is hardened by heating it to a high temperature and then quenching it (cooling it rapidly, to retain the crystal structure of the hot material).

Soft materials:

• Soft materials are ones that can be easily crushed, cut, bent, or scraped.
• Just a few examples include colloids, polymers, liquid crystals, gels, emulsions, foams, and the tissue that makes up the bulk of the animal world.
• Soft materials have a more flexible structure in the linkages between molecules or in the crystal structure, which allows them to "give" when a force is applied to them.
• Numerous weaker materials stay robust due to the material's many connections.
• Rubber in a tyre, for example, is rather strong but still relatively soft, and adapts to the minor surface structure of a road (which has a harder surface, relative to the rubber).
• This is because the molecules in rubber are long strings that are linked together.