Advanced Materials

Mushroom Roots Emerge As Eco Alternative to Styrofoam January 31, 2010 Move over Dow Chemical Co. Two recent engineering grads from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy have invented a new sustainable packaging technology that will challenge expanded polystyrene foam used in packaging and building insulation (Styrofoam). While classmates were enjoying pub crawls, Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre were fascinated by mushrooms growing on wood chips. They saw how fungal mycelium (mushroom roots) bonded wood chips together, just like a matrix resin binds together prepregs.  In a class at Rensselaer called Inventors Studio, they used this idea to create a product now trademarked Greensulate. They take locally sourced agricultural byproducts such as rice hulls or cotton gin trash and use their now patent-pending process to introduce fungal mycelium. In 5-10 days loose agricultural byproducts are transformed into a rigid material that has similar material properties as synthetic foams like the expanded polystyrene invented by Dow in 1941. Greensulate and a packaging product called EcoCradle are aerobically and anaerobically compostable, which means they will biodegrade  in a garden, home compost pile or in a landfill. That’s a big plus compared to many plant-based plastics being proposed for packaging applications. There are no spores in the material. This stuff is even fire-safe. According to Bayer and McIntyre you can hold a blow torch up to Greensulate and it won’t catch on fire! They have a video on their Web site to prove it. Ok, what does it cost? They project costs will be competitive with expanded polystyrene foam or bubble wrap. But they haven’t scaled up the technology yet. They’re shipping samples, and are looking for partners to help them commercialize the technology. Their company, called Ecovative Design, is based near Troy, NY.

The ultra-high-strength composite metal foam created by Afsaneh Rabiei is a highlight of a well-traveled career during which the researcher has tried to learn everything she can about advanced materials. The result: a brand new material that can save energy and lives. “Basically, it is a new material for all sorts of safety devices,” said Rabiei, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. Rabiei’s invention isn’t the first metal foam, but she says it’s the strongest. The main weakness of existing metal foams is the varying sizes of their cells — tiny pockets of space inside the material. Instead, Rabiei used cells of standard sizes and combined them with a metallic matrix to support the cell walls. That helps

And since the bulk steel is three times heavier than the steel foam, it’s easy to see how the foam could attract car manufacturers looking for a bumper that will improve safety and gas mileage. Rabiei sees plenty of uses for her invention, including in airplanes, boats, and structures that need impact protection with maintaining low weight. It’s this high strength-to-density ratio — defining a material that’s both strong and light — that makes Rabiei’s foam unique. “This material showed a much higher strength-to-density ratio than any metal foam that has ever been reported,” she said.

Dubbed a "spaser", this minuscule lasing object is the latest by-product of a buzzing field known as nanoplasmonics. Just as microelectronics exploits the behaviour of electrons in metals and semiconductors on micrometre scales, so nanoplasmonics is concerned with the nanoscale comings and goings of entities known as plasmons that lurk on and below the surfaces of metals. To envisage what as plasmon is, imagine a metal as a great sea of freely moving electrons. When light of the right frequency strikes the surface of the metal, it can set up a wavelike oscillation in this electron sea, just as the wind whips up waves on the ocean. These collective electron waves - plasmons - act to all intents and purposes as light waves trapped in the metal's surface. Their wavelengths depend on the metal, but are generally measured in nanometres. Their frequencies span the terahertz range - equivalent to the frequency range of light from the ultraviolet right through the visible to the infrared.

Nano-scale medical research is promising some amazing breakthroughs in diagnosis and drug delivery techniques.  In spectroscopy, for example, tiny crystals called qdots (quantum dots, also called nanocrystals) can be used to study cells at the molecular level. It’s an emerging field that’s ready to explode into mainstream medicine - but there’s a catch.

MATERIALS Understanding Materials Websites with useful information on materials in design

Smart dudes at Nanosys are figuring out a way to make the colors of LED lights more vivid, while using the same amount of energy as current LEDs. How are they accomplishing this feat? Why, they're using nanotechnology, of course. They slather this nano goop over blue LED lights, because that color is the most energy-efficient. This strange semiconductor material changes the colors of those LEDs, resulting in a rainbow of hues that look a whole lot brighter. Best of all, this nanotech can make the color rendering index (CRI) of warm white light look a lot more appealing. Bravo. Expect to see this tech on laptop displays, HDTV screens, and lighting fixtures by the end of this year.

This is the discovery that could put the College of Wooster on the map: glass that swells like a sponge.  Put together like a nano-matrix, the new glass can unfold to hold up to eight times its weight.  The glass binds with gasoline and other pollutants containing volatile organic compounds but it does not bind with water, so it acts like a “smart” sponge, capable of picking and choosing from contaminated groundwater.

In an important first for a promising new technology, scientists have used a quantum computer to calculate the precise energy of molecular hydrogen. This groundbreaking approach to molecular simulations could have profound implications not just for quantum chemistry, but also for a range of fields from cryptography to materials science. "One of the most important problems for many theoretical chemists is how to execute exact simulations of chemical systems," says author Alán Aspuru-Guzik, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. "This is the first time that a quantum computer has been built to provide these precise calculations."

A team of researchers at the FOM institute AMOLF (The Netherlands) has succeeded for the first time in powering an energy transfer between nano-electromagnets with the magnetic field of light. This breakthrough is of major importance in the quest for magnetic 'meta-materials' with which light rays can be deflected in every possible direction. This could make it possible to produce perfect lenses, and in the fullness of time, even 'invisibility cloaks.'

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