Tag Archives: Tiffany R. Wals

US Air Force takes baby steps toward shapeshifting materials

When I see information about US military futuristic projects it’s usually from the US Army’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).  Consequently, I was surprised to notice that this shapeshifting project is being funded by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research according to the July 11, 2012 news item on phys.org,

An international research team has received a $2.9 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to design nanomaterials whose internal structure changes shape in response to stimuli such as heat or light.

Each of these novel materials will be constructed from three types of components: inorganic nanoparticles with desired optical or electrical properties; peptides that bond to these nanoparticles; and special molecules called spacers, which sit between the peptides and bend in the presence of heat, light or other triggers.

When stimulated, the spacers will cause the arrangement of nanoparticles within the material to morph — a process that can lead to interesting and useful effects.

Shape-shifting materials of the kind the researchers are planning to create could have use in applications including color-changing sensors and plasmonic circuits that divert light in two directions.

The news item originated from a July 11, 2012 news release from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo,

The project is being led by Paras Prasad, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the University at Buffalo’s departments of chemistry, physics, electrical engineering and medicine, and executive director of UB’s Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB). …

Prasad’s fellow investigators include Aidong Zhang, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UB; Mark T. Swihart, professor of chemical and biological engineering at UB and director of the UB 2020 Integrated Nanostructured Systems Strategic Strength; Tiffany R. Walsh, associate professor at the Institute for Frontier Materials at Deakin University in Australia; and Marc R. Knecht, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Miami.

The palette of parts the team will use to build the nanomaterials includes spacers of different sizes, along with seven types of nanoparticles — gold, silver, silica, iron-oxide, iron-platinum, cadmium-sulfide and zinc-sulfide.

To identify the combinations of components that will produce the most interesting materials, the scientists will use high-throughput experiments and data-mining techniques to screen and analyze the vast number of possible combinations of nanostructures, biomolecular linking elements (the peptides) and assembly conditions.

“One of our goals is to contribute to the fundamental understanding of how the spatial arrangement of nanoscale components in materials affects their optical, magnetic and plasmonic properties,” Prasad said. “The high-throughput techniques we are using were pioneered in the field of bioinformatics, but also have extraordinary promise in the exploration of advanced materials.”

Zhang said, “The computational capabilities offered by informatics and data mining will enable us to maximize the value of our data regarding the nanoassemblies, to generate and to construct new assemblies that span a wide range of inorganic and bimolecular components so as to achieve desired combinatorics-based properties.”

It’s not exactly the shapeshifting one sees in science fiction but this will be the real stuff (not to be confused with The Right Stuff, a 1983 movie about the US space travel programme of the late 1950s to 1960s).