Tag Archives: Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies

Tree-on-a-chip

It’s usually organ-on-a-chip or lab-on-a-chip or human-on-a-chip; this is my first tree-on-a-chip.

Engineers have designed a microfluidic device they call a “tree-on-a-chip,” which mimics the pumping mechanism of trees and other plants. Courtesy: MIT

From a March 20, 2017 news item on phys.org,

Trees and other plants, from towering redwoods to diminutive daisies, are nature’s hydraulic pumps. They are constantly pulling water up from their roots to the topmost leaves, and pumping sugars produced by their leaves back down to the roots. This constant stream of nutrients is shuttled through a system of tissues called xylem and phloem, which are packed together in woody, parallel conduits.

Now engineers at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and their collaborators have designed a microfluidic device they call a “tree-on-a-chip,” which mimics the pumping mechanism of trees and plants. Like its natural counterparts, the chip operates passively, requiring no moving parts or external pumps. It is able to pump water and sugars through the chip at a steady flow rate for several days. The results are published this week in Nature Plants.

A March 20, 2017 MIT news release by Jennifer Chu, which originated the news item, describes the work in more detail,

Anette “Peko” Hosoi, professor and associate department head for operations in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, says the chip’s passive pumping may be leveraged as a simple hydraulic actuator for small robots. Engineers have found it difficult and expensive to make tiny, movable parts and pumps to power complex movements in small robots. The team’s new pumping mechanism may enable robots whose motions are propelled by inexpensive, sugar-powered pumps.

“The goal of this work is cheap complexity, like one sees in nature,” Hosoi says. “It’s easy to add another leaf or xylem channel in a tree. In small robotics, everything is hard, from manufacturing, to integration, to actuation. If we could make the building blocks that enable cheap complexity, that would be super exciting. I think these [microfluidic pumps] are a step in that direction.”

Hosoi’s co-authors on the paper are lead author Jean Comtet, a former graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering; Kaare Jensen of the Technical University of Denmark; and Robert Turgeon and Abraham Stroock, both of Cornell University.

A hydraulic lift

The group’s tree-inspired work grew out of a project on hydraulic robots powered by pumping fluids. Hosoi was interested in designing hydraulic robots at the small scale, that could perform actions similar to much bigger robots like Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog, a four-legged, Saint Bernard-sized robot that runs and jumps over rough terrain, powered by hydraulic actuators.

“For small systems, it’s often expensive to manufacture tiny moving pieces,” Hosoi says. “So we thought, ‘What if we could make a small-scale hydraulic system that could generate large pressures, with no moving parts?’ And then we asked, ‘Does anything do this in nature?’ It turns out that trees do.”

The general understanding among biologists has been that water, propelled by surface tension, travels up a tree’s channels of xylem, then diffuses through a semipermeable membrane and down into channels of phloem that contain sugar and other nutrients.

The more sugar there is in the phloem, the more water flows from xylem to phloem to balance out the sugar-to-water gradient, in a passive process known as osmosis. The resulting water flow flushes nutrients down to the roots. Trees and plants are thought to maintain this pumping process as more water is drawn up from their roots.

“This simple model of xylem and phloem has been well-known for decades,” Hosoi says. “From a qualitative point of view, this makes sense. But when you actually run the numbers, you realize this simple model does not allow for steady flow.”

In fact, engineers have previously attempted to design tree-inspired microfluidic pumps, fabricating parts that mimic xylem and phloem. But they found that these designs quickly stopped pumping within minutes.

It was Hosoi’s student Comtet who identified a third essential part to a tree’s pumping system: its leaves, which produce sugars through photosynthesis. Comtet’s model includes this additional source of sugars that diffuse from the leaves into a plant’s phloem, increasing the sugar-to-water gradient, which in turn maintains a constant osmotic pressure, circulating water and nutrients continuously throughout a tree.

Running on sugar

With Comtet’s hypothesis in mind, Hosoi and her team designed their tree-on-a-chip, a microfluidic pump that mimics a tree’s xylem, phloem, and most importantly, its sugar-producing leaves.

To make the chip, the researchers sandwiched together two plastic slides, through which they drilled small channels to represent xylem and phloem. They filled the xylem channel with water, and the phloem channel with water and sugar, then separated the two slides with a semipermeable material to mimic the membrane between xylem and phloem. They placed another membrane over the slide containing the phloem channel, and set a sugar cube on top to represent the additional source of sugar diffusing from a tree’s leaves into the phloem. They hooked the chip up to a tube, which fed water from a tank into the chip.

With this simple setup, the chip was able to passively pump water from the tank through the chip and out into a beaker, at a constant flow rate for several days, as opposed to previous designs that only pumped for several minutes.

“As soon as we put this sugar source in, we had it running for days at a steady state,” Hosoi says. “That’s exactly what we need. We want a device we can actually put in a robot.”

Hosoi envisions that the tree-on-a-chip pump may be built into a small robot to produce hydraulically powered motions, without requiring active pumps or parts.

“If you design your robot in a smart way, you could absolutely stick a sugar cube on it and let it go,” Hosoi says.

This research was supported, in part, by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency [DARPA].

This research’s funding connection to DARPA reminded me that MIT has an Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Getting back to the tree-on-a-chip, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Passive phloem loading and long-distance transport in a synthetic tree-on-a-chip by Jean Comtet, Kaare H. Jensen, Robert Turgeon, Abraham D. Stroock & A. E. Hosoi. Nature Plants 3, Article number: 17032 (2017)  doi:10.1038/nplants.2017.32 Published online: 20 March 2017

This paper is behind a paywall.

Getting back to incandescent light (recycling the military way)

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) issued two news releases about this research into reclaiming incandescent light or as they call it “recycling light.” First off, there’s the Jan. 11, 2016 MIT Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies news release by Paola Rebusco on EurekAlert,

Humanity started recycling relatively early in its evolution: there are proofs that trash recycling was taking place as early as in the 500 BC. What about light recycling? Consider light bulbs: more than one hundred and thirty years ago Thomas Edison patented the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb, so that “none but the extravagant” would ever “burn tallow candles”, paving the way for more than a century of incandescent lighting. In fact, emergence of electric lighting was the main motivating factor for deployment of electricity into every home in the world. The incandescent bulb is an example of a high temperature thermal emitter. It is very useful, but only a small fraction of the emitted light (and therefore energy) is used: most of the light is emitted in the infrared, invisible to the human eye, and in this context wasted.

Now, in a study published in Nature Nanotechnology on January 11th 2016 (online), a team of MIT researchers describes another way to recycle light emitted at unwanted infrared wavelengths while optimizing the emission at useful visible wavelengths. …

“For a thermal emitter at moderate temperatures one usually nano-patterns its surface to alter the emission,” says Ilic [postdoc Ognjen Ilic], the lead author of the study. “At high temperatures” – a light bulb filament reaches 3000K! – “such nanostructures deteriorate and it is impossible to alter the emission spectrum by having a nanostructure directly on the surface of the emitter.” The team solved the problem by surrounding the hot object with special nanophotonic structures that spectrally filter the emitted light, meaning that they let the light reflect or pass through based on its color (i.e. its wavelength). Because the filters are not in direct physical contact with the emitter, temperatures can be very high.

To showcase this idea, the team picked one of the highest temperature thermal emitters available – an incandescent light bulb. The authors designed nanofilters to recycle the infrared light, while allowing the visible light to go through. “The key advance was to design a photonic structure that transmits visible light and reflects infrared light for a very wide range of angles,” explains Ilic. “Conventional photonic filters usually operate for a single incidence angle. The challenge for us was to extend the desired optical properties across all directions,” a feat the authors achieved using special numerical optimization techniques.

However, for this scheme to work, the authors had to redesign the incandescent filament from scratch. “In a regular light bulb, the filament is a long and curly piece of tungsten wire. Here, the filament is laser-machined out of a flat sheet of tungsten: it is completely planar,” says Bermel [professor Peter Bermel now at Purdue University]. A planar filament has a large area, and is therefore very efficient in re-absorbing the light that was reflected by the filter. In describing how the new device differs from previously suggested concepts, Soljačić [professor Marin Soljačić], the project lead, emphasizes that “it is the combination of the exceptional properties of the filter and the shape of the filament that enabled substantial recycling of unwanted radiated light.”

In the new-concept light bulb prototype built by the authors, the efficiency approaches some fluorescent and LED bulbs. Nonetheless, the theoretical model predicts plenty of room for improvement. “This experimental device is a proof-of-concept, at the low end of performance that could be ultimately achieved by this approach,” argues Celanovic [principal research scientist Ivan Celanovic]. There are other advantages of this approach: “An important feature is that our demonstrated device achieves near-ideal rendering of colors,” notes Ilic, referring to the requirement of light sources to faithfully reproduce surrounding colors. That is precisely the reason why incandescent lights remained dominant for so long: their warm light has remained preferable to drab fluorescent lighting for decades.

Some practical questions need to be addressed before this technology can be widely adopted. “We will work closely with our mechanical engineering colleagues at MIT to try to tackle the issues of thermal stability and long-lifetime,” says Soljačić. The authors are particularly excited about the potential for producing these devices cheaply. “The materials we need are abundant and inexpensive,” Joannopoulos [professor John Joannopoulos] notes, “and the filters themselves–consisting of stacks of commonly deposited materials–are amenable to large-scale deposition.”

Chen [professor Gang Chen] comments further: “The lighting potential of this technology is exciting, but the same approach could also be used to improve the performance of energy conversion schemes such as thermo-photovoltaics.” In a thermo-photovoltaic device, external heat causes the material to glow, emitting light that is converted into an electric current by an absorbing photovoltaic element.

The last point captures the main motivation behind the work. “Light radiated from a hot object can be quite useful, whether that object is an incandescent filament or the Sun,” Ilic says. At its core, this work is about recycling thermal light for a specific application; “a 3000-degree filament is one of the hottest and the most challenging sources to work with,” Ilic continues. “It’s also what makes it a crucial test of our approach.”

There are a few more details in the 2nd Jan. 11, 2016 MIT news release on EurekAlert,

Light recycling

The key is to create a two-stage process, the researchers report. The first stage involves a conventional heated metal filament, with all its attendant losses. But instead of allowing the waste heat to dissipate in the form of infrared radiation, secondary structures surrounding the filament capture this radiation and reflect it back to the filament to be re-absorbed and re-emitted as visible light. These structures, a form of photonic crystal, are made of Earth-abundant elements and can be made using conventional material-deposition technology.

That second step makes a dramatic difference in how efficiently the system converts light into electricity. The efficiency of conventional incandescent lights is between 2 and 3 percent, while that of fluorescents (including CFLs) is currently between 7 and 13 percent, and that of LEDs between 5 and 13 percent. In contrast, the new two-stage incandescents could reach efficiencies as high as 40 percent, the team says.

The first proof-of-concept units made by the team do not yet reach that level, achieving about 6.6 percent efficiency. But even that preliminary result matches the efficiency of some of today’s CFLs and LEDs, they point out. And it is already a threefold improvement over the efficiency of today’s incandescents.

The team refers to their approach as “light recycling,” says Ilic, since their material takes in the unwanted, useless wavelengths of energy and converts them into the visible light wavelengths that are desired. “It recycles the energy that would otherwise be wasted,” says Soljačić.

Bulbs and beyond

One key to their success was designing a photonic crystal that works for a very wide range of wavelengths and angles. The photonic crystal itself is made as a stack of thin layers, deposited on a substrate. “When you put together layers, with the right thicknesses and sequence,” Ilic explains, you can get very efficient tuning of how the material interacts with light. In their system, the desired visible wavelengths pass right through the material and on out of the bulb, but the infrared wavelengths get reflected as if from a mirror. They then travel back to the filament, adding more heat that then gets converted to more light. Since only the visible ever gets out, the heat just keeps bouncing back in toward the filament until it finally ends up as visible light.

I appreciate both MIT news release writers for “Thomas Edison patented the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb” (Rebusco) and the unidentified writer of the 2nd MIT news release for this, from the news release, “Incandescent bulbs, commercially developed by Thomas Edison (and still used by cartoonists as the symbol of inventive insight) … .” Edison did not invent the light bulb. BTW, the emphases are mine.

For interested parties, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Tailoring high-temperature radiation and the resurrection of the incandescent source by Ognjen Ilic, Peter Bermel, Gang Chen, John D. Joannopoulos, Ivan Celanovic, & Marin Soljačić. Nature Nanotechnology  (2016) doi:10.1038/nnano.2015.309 Published online 11 January 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

Never bleed again? New nanoscale bio coating stops bleeding in seconds

It’s not quite instantaneous but the new nanoscale biological coating devised by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) engineers at their Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies cuts bleeding time to less than 1/2 of what it was (from 150 seconds to 60 seconds) in animal tests. The Jan. 10, 2012 news item on Nanowerk provides more detail,

MIT engineers have developed a nanoscale biological coating that can halt bleeding nearly instantaneously, an advance that could dramatically improve survival rates for soldiers injured in battle.

The researchers, led by Paula Hammond and funded by MIT’s Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies and a Denmark-based company, Ferrosan Medical Devices A/S, created a spray coating that includes thrombin, a clotting agent found in blood. Sponges coated with this material can be stored stably and easily carried by soldiers or medical personnel.

The Jan. 10, 2012 news release by Anne Trafton for MIT notes,

Uncontrolled bleeding is the leading cause of trauma death on the battlefield. Traditional methods to halt bleeding, such as tourniquets, are not suitable for the neck and many other parts of the body. In recent years, researchers have tried alternative approaches, all of which have some disadvantages. Fibrin dressings and glues have a short shelf life and can cause an adverse immune response, and zeolite powders are difficult to apply under windy conditions and can cause severe burns. Another option is bandages made of chitosan, a derivative of the primary structural material of shellfish exoskeletons. Those bandages have had some success but can be difficult to mold to fit complex wounds.

Many civilian hospitals use a highly absorbent gelatin sponge produced by Ferrosan to stop bleeding. However, those sponges need to be soaked in liquid thrombin just before application to the wound, making them impractical for battlefield use. Hammond’s team came up with the idea to coat the sponges with a blood-clotting agent in advance, so they would be ready when needed, for either military or civilian use.

To do that, the researchers developed a nanoscale biological coating that consists of two alternating layers sprayed onto a material, such as the sponges used in this study. The researchers discovered that layers of thrombin, a natural clotting protein, and tannic acid, a small molecule found naturally in tea, yield a film containing large amounts of functional thrombin. Both materials are already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which could help with the approval process for a commercialized version of the sponges, Shukla [Anita Shukla PhD ’11] says.

A key advantage of the spray method is that it allows a large amount of thrombin to be packed into the sponges, coating even the interior fibers, says David King, a trauma surgeon and instructor in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in this research.

“All of the existing hemostatic materials suffer from the same limitation, which is being able to deliver a dense enough package of hemostatic material to the bleeding site. That’s why this new material is exciting,” says King, also an Army reservist who has served in Afghanistan as chief of trauma surgery.

Very exciting stuff but no word as to when it might reach the marketplace. A patent application has been filed but it doesn’t seem that any human clinical trials have been held yet. As best I can determine, all of the testing done (at Ferrosan) so far has been on animals.

I did check out the Ferrosan website and found this on their About page,

Ferrosan is an international consumer health company with strong market positions and a solid financial performance.

We strive for optimal development by selectively aiming for position as a leader through organic as well as M&A-driven growth.

In order to accomplish our objectives each employee must deliver upon Ferrosan’s values:

  • Get things done
  • Exceed expectations
  • Appreciate individual differences
  • Enjoy and have fun

The foundation of our future success is based on each employee’s ability to make a difference.

Ferrosan is a well established pharmaceutical company with a great heritage. In 2010, we celebrated the company’s 90th anniversary.