Hahn was part of a team of researchers led by mechanical engineering professor Marc Meyers that investigated what makes eggshells so strong. Their findings were published last week in Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
|Eric Nicholas Hahn, the first author of the study.|
"This paper revealed, for the first time, the mechanism by which the eggs break when subjected to axial compression. It is not the compression by my hands that breaks the egg, but the tension generated radially,” Meyers said.
Meyers was interested in this topic since he was a child growing up in Brazil. He added, "We would like to check the universality of our equations by testing eggs of all kinds of birds. There are a variety of interesting birds that we did not test because their eggs are difficult to come by: penguins, eagles, dinosaur..."
Source: The Royal Society Publishing Blog
Full paper: "Nature's technical ceramic: the avian eggshell."