Tag Archives: pipes

Salt ‘creatures’ could help unclog industrial pipes

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I love the video (wish the narrator had a more conversational style rather than the ‘read aloud’ style so many of us adopted in school),

Joel Goldberg’s April 28, 2021 news article (short read) in Science magazine online describes the research (Note: A link has been removed),

Behold the salt monsters. These twisted mineral crystals—formed from the buildup of slightly salty water in power plant pipes—come in many shapes and sizes. But the tiny monsters are a big problem: Each year, they cost the world’s power plants at least $100 billion because workers have to purge the pipes and scrub the crystals from filters.

Now, a solution may be at hand. Engineers can reduce the damage by coating the insides of the pipes with textured, water-repellant [hydrophobic] surfaces …

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Crystal critters: Self-ejection of crystals from heated, superhydrophobic surfaces by Samantha A. McBride, Henri-Louis Girard, and Kripa K. Varanasi. Science Advances 28 Apr 2021: Vol. 7, no. 18, eabe6960 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe6960

This paper is open access. As research papers go, this is quite readable, from the Introduction (Note: Links have been removed),

Many of the uses for water are intimately familiar to us. Drinking water, wash water, water for agriculture, and even water used for recreation have an omnipresent and essential impact on our lives. However, water’s impact and importance extend far beyond these everyday uses. In many developed countries, thermoelectric power production is one of the largest sources of water consumption (1), where it is used to cool reactors and transport heat. In 2015, 41% of all surface water withdrawals in the United States went toward cooling in thermoelectric power plants (2). Thermoelectric power accounts for 90% of all electricity generated within the United States and encompasses many forms of power production, including nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil.

…

There you go.

Making the impossible possible: on demand and by design, atomic scale pipes

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This research on pipes from the University of Manchester will probably never finds its way into plumbing practices but, apparently, is of great interest in fundamental research. From a Sept. 7, 2016 news item on phys.org,

Materials containing tiny capillaries and cavities are widely used in filtration, separation and many other technologies, without which our modern lifestyle would be impossible. Those materials are usually found by luck or accident rather than design. It has been impossible to create artificial capillaries with atomic-scale precision.

Now a Manchester group led by postdoctoral researcher Radha Boya and Nobel laureate Andre Geim show how to make the impossible possible, as reported in Nature.

A Sept. 7, 2016 University of Manchester press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item,  provides a description of the technology,

The new technology is elegant, adaptable and strikingly simple. In fact, it is a kind of antipode of the famous material graphene. When making graphene, people often take a piece of graphite and use Scotch tape to extract a single atomic plane of carbon atoms, graphene. The remaining graphite is discarded.

In this new research, Manchester scientists similarly extracted a strip of graphene from graphite, but discarded the graphene and focused on what was left: an ultra-thin cavity within the graphite crystal.

Such atomic scale cavities can be made from various materials to achieve not only a desired size but also to choose properties of capillary walls. They can be atomically smooth or rough, hydrophilic or hydrophobic, insulating or conductive, electrically charged or neutral; the list goes on.

The voids can be made as cavities (to confine various substances) or open-ended tunnels (to transport different gases and liquids), which is of huge interest for fundamental research and many applications. It is limited only by imagination what such narrow tunnels with designer properties can potentially do for us.

Properties of materials at this truly atomic scale are expected to be quite different from those we are familiar with in our macroscopic world. To demonstrate that this is the case of their atomic-scale voids, the Manchester group tested how water runs through those ultra-narrow pipes.

To everyone’s surprise, they found water to flow with little friction and at high speed, as if the channels were many thousands times wider than they actually are.

Radha Boya commented ‘This is an entirely new type of nanoscale systems. Such capillaries were never imagined, even in theory. No one thought that this degree of accuracy in design could be possible. New filtration, desalination, gas separation technologies are kind of obvious directions but there are so many others to explore’.

Sir Andre added ‘Making something useful out of an empty space is certainly cute. Finding that this space offers so much of new science is flabbergasting. Even with hindsight, I did not expect the idea to work so well. There are myriads of possibilities for research and development, which now need to be looked at. We are stunned by the choice.’

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Molecular transport through capillaries made with atomic-scale precision by B. Radha, A. Esfandiar, F. C. Wang, A. P. Rooney, K. Gopinadhan, A. Keerthi, A. Mishchenko, A. Janardanan, P. Blake, L. Fumagalli, M. Lozada-Hidalgo, S. Garaj, S. J. Haigh, I. V. Grigorieva, H. A. Wu, & A. K. Geim. Nature (2016)  doi:10.1038/nature19363 Published online 07 September 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

McGill University researchers put the squeeze Tomonaga-Luttinger theory in quantum mechanics

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McGill University (Montréal, Québec, Canada) researchers testing the Tomonaga-Luttinger theory had international help according to a May 15, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,

We all know intuitively that normal liquids flow more quickly as the channel containing them tightens. Think of a river flowing through narrow rapids.

But what if a pipe were so amazingly tiny that only a few atoms of superfluid helium could squeeze through its opening at once? According to a longstanding quantum-mechanics model, the superfluid helium would behave differently from a normal liquid: far from speeding up, it would actually slow down.

For more than 70 years, scientists have been studying the flow of helium through ever smaller pipes. But only recently has nanotechnology made it possible to reach the scale required to test the theoretical model, known as the Tomonaga-Luttinger theory (after the scientists who developed it).

Now, a team of McGill University researchers, with collaborators at the University of Vermont and at Leipzig University in Germany, has succeeded in conducting experiments with the smallest channel yet – less than 30 atoms wide. In results published online today in Science Advances, the researchers report that the flow of superfluid helium through this miniature faucet does, indeed, appear to slow down.

A May 15, 2015 University of McGill news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, expands on the theme and notes this is one step on the road to proving the theory,

“Our results suggest that a quantum faucet does show a fundamentally different behaviour,” says McGill physics professor Guillaume Gervais, who led the project. “We don’t have the smoking gun yet. But we think this a great step toward proving experimentally the Tomonaga-Luttinger theory in a real liquid.”

The zone where physics changes

Insights from the research could someday contribute to novel technologies, such as nano-sensors with applications in GPS systems. But for now, Gervais says, the results are significant simply because “we’re pushing the limit of understanding things on the nanoscale. We’re approaching the grey zone where all physics changes.”

Prof. Adrian Del Maestro from the University of Vermont has been employing high-performance computer simulations to understand just how small the faucet has to be before this new physics emerges. “The ability to study a quantum liquid at such diminutive length scales in the laboratory is extremely exciting as it allows us to extend our fundamental understanding of how atoms cooperate to form the superfluid state of matter,” he says. “The superfluid slowdown we observe signals that this cooperation is starting to break down as the width of the pipe narrows to the nanoscale” and edges closer to the exotic one-dimensional limit envisioned in the Tomonaga-Luttinger theory.

Building what is probably the world’s smallest faucet has been no simple task. Gervais hatched the idea during a five-minute conversation over coffee with a world-leading theoretical physicist. That was eight years ago. But getting the nano-plumbing to work took “at least 100 trials – maybe 200,” says Gervais, who is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

A beam of electrons as drill bit

Using a beam of electrons as a kind of drill bit, the team made holes as small as seven nanometers wide in a piece of silicon nitride, a tough material used in applications such as automotive diesel engines and high-performance ball bearings. By cooling the apparatus to very low temperatures, placing superfluid helium on one side of the pore and applying a vacuum to the other, the researchers were able to observe the flow of the superfluid through the channel. Varying the size of the channel, they found that the maximum speed of the flow slowed as the radius of the pore decreased.

The experiments take advantage of a unique characteristic of superfluids. Unlike ordinary liquids – water or maple syrup, for example – superfluids can flow without any viscosity. As a result, they can course through extremely narrow channels; and once in motion, they don’t need any pressure to keep going. Helium is the only element in nature known to become a superfluid; it does so when cooled to an extremely low temperature.

An inadvertent breakthrough

For years, however, the researchers were frustrated by a technical glitch: the tiny pore in the silicon nitride material kept getting clogged by contaminants. Then one day, while Gervais was away at a conference abroad, a new student in his lab inadvertently deviated from the team’s operating procedure and left a valve open in the apparatus. “It turned out that this open valve kept the hole open,” Gervais says. “It was the key to getting the experiment to work. Scientific breakthroughs don’t always happen by design!”

Prof. Bernd Rosenow, a quantum physicist at Leipzig University’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, also contributed to the study.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Critical flow and dissipation in a quasi–one-dimensional superfluid by Pierre-François Duc, Michel Savard, Matei Petrescu, Bernd Rosenow, Adrian Del Maestro, Guillaume Gervais. Science Advances 15 May 2015: Vol. 1 no. 4 e1400222 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400222

This is an open access paper.