Fish scales may hold the key to developing flexible yet tough materials to protect workers in manufacturing settings.

Over a two-year period, researchers went through about 50 fish, puncturing or fracturing hundreds of fish scales under the microscope, to try to understand their properties and mechanics better.

An alligator gar.An alligator gar.François Barthelat from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, looks to nature for inspiration to solve engineering problems.

He and his team worked to replicate the kind of protection combined with the flexibility offered by certain kinds of animal scales. Their goal is to create protective gloves that are both resistant to piercing and still flexible enough for factory workers to work in.

The solution came when they started looking more closely at the scales of an alligator gar.

Through a series of experiments, the researchers identified a set of critical mechanisms in the way natural fish scales deform, interact, and fracture. They also developed a technique to cover large surfaces with a shell of overlapping ceramic tiles. By using computer modeling, the researchers were able to determine the optimal size, shape, arrangement, and overlap to make protective gloves that are more resistant to piercing than those currently in use.

According to researchers, fish scales were surprising. They discovered that smaller scales are actually more difficult to pierce than the larger ones, something that can now be explained using engineering analysis. They also learned that fish scales are among the toughest collagen-based materials known.

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