A buckyball, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, is made up of carbon atoms ordered in a shape that resembles a soccer ball and the full name is bckminsterfullerene (a type of fullerene).
This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Benjah-bmm27. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Benjah-bmm27 grants anyone the right to use this work File:Buckminsterfullerene-perspective-3D-balls.png Uploaded: 9 April 2007 [downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene#/media/File:Buckminsterfullerene-perspective-3D-balls.png]
Far from Earth, in the vast expanses of space between stars, exists a treasure trove of carbon. There, in what scientists call the “interstellar medium,” you can find a wide range of organic molecules—from honeycomblike polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to spheres of carbon shaped like soccer balls.
Image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of the so-called “Pillars of Creation,” a region in the Eagle Nebula where clouds of gas and dust are collapsing to form new stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI) Courtesy: University of Colorado at Boulder
In a new study, an international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have used experiments on Earth to recreate the chemistry deep in space. The group’s results may have uncovered key steps in the processes that shape these organic molecules over time.
The findings could reveal information about the building blocks that once formed Earth’s solar system, said Jordy Bouwman, lead author of the study. Billions of years ago, similar clouds of matter have condensed to form the seeds of what would become our own sun and its planets.
“We’re all made of carbon, so it’s really important to know how carbon in the universe gets transformed on its way to being incorporated in a planetary system like our own solar system,” said Bouwman, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder.
The research, published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, sheds light on the formation of a class of molecules called fullerenes.
Fullerenes are made up of carbon atoms organized in the shape of a closed cage. The most famous example is buckminsterfullerene, or the buckyball, which gets its name from famed futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller. These molecules include 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a sphere and bear a striking resemblance to a FIFA regulation soccer ball.
Fullerenes, including buckyballs, float freely in the interstellar medium. But scientists have long struggled to explain where they come from and how they are formed.
The new study suggests that radiation in space may help to transform PAHs into fullerenes.
“This gives us a hint that the buckyballs that we find in space may be connected to these large aromatic molecules that are also abundant,” Bouwman said.
Space chemistry, on Earth
The group simulated the chemistry in space by studying two small PAH molecules called anthracene and phenanthrene.
PAHs are made up of carbon atoms arranged in a series of hexagons, not unlike a honeycomb. They’re abundant on Earth where you can find them in smoke, soot and other charred materials.
“If you put your steak on the grill for too long, and it gets black, that contains PAHs,” Bouwman said. “They’re a nasty byproduct of combustion.”
First, the researchers bombarded the two PAHs with a beam of electrons. It’s similar to what happens when radiation in space interacts with molecules in the interstellar medium.
This bombardment transformed the PAHs into new, charged organic molecules. The researchers then fed the products into an ion trap apparatus at a scientific facility called the Free Electron Lasers for Infrared eXperiments (FELIX). This one-of-a-kind national research facility is located in Nijmegen in the Netherlands and includes several lasers that spread across a large basement room. Using those lasers, the researchers were able to precisely probe the structure of their new molecules.
They were surprised when they saw the results.
Making buckyballs
Bouwman explained that when the team hit anthracene and phenanthrene with electrons, the molecules lost one or two of their hydrogen atoms.
In the process, they also radically changed their structures, like disassembling a Lego castle and building a new structure. Instead of just including hexagons, the resulting products now carried carbon atoms arranged in the shape of both hexagons and pentagons.
That radical reaction had never been seen before, Bouwman said. Whether these kinds of pentagon-bearing molecules are also common in space isn’t clear.
“That was a very surprising result—that just by kicking off a hydrogen atom or two, the entire molecule completely rearranged,” said Sandra Brünken, a co-author of the study, associate professor at Radboud University and group leader at FELIX.
The results were eye-opening, in part because those kinds of molecules are also really easy to fold up. (Just picture a soccer ball, which is made up of a mix of both hexagons and pentagons).
In other words, these pentagon-bearing molecules may be the missing link for converting common PAHs into buckyballs and other fullerenes.
Bouwman and Brünken hope that astrophysicists will take note. Scientists could use the team’s findings to see if similar pentagon-bearing molecules exist deep in space using tools like the James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful telescope ever launched.
“You can take our results from the laboratory, and then use them as a fingerprint to look for the same signatures in space,” Brünken said.
CU Boulder co-authors of the new study include LASP graduate students Madison Patch and Rory McClish. Other co-authors include scientists at Radboud University; Leiden University in the Netherlands; Paris-East Créteil University in France; and the University of Maryland College Park.
Matthew Davidson, a Research Associate with the University of Colorado demonstrates a 3D printed biomaterials for use inside the body including bandages that could be put on a beating human heart in Jason Burdick’s lab. (Photo by Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado)
Soft, strong, and flexible, that’s what you need if you’re going to apply a bandage to a heart and according to an August 1, 2024 news item on phys.org, researchers have developed a promising new material,
In the quest to develop life-like materials to replace and repair human body parts, scientists face a formidable challenge: Real tissues are often both strong and stretchable and vary in shape and size.
A CU [Colorado University] Boulder-led team, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, has taken a critical step toward cracking that code. They’ve developed a new way to 3D print material that is at once elastic enough to withstand a heart’s persistent beating, tough enough to endure the crushing load placed on joints, and easily shapable to fit a patient’s unique defects.
Better yet, it sticks easily to wet tissue.
Their breakthrough, described in the Aug. 2 [2024] edition of the journal Science, helps pave the way toward a new generation of biomaterials, from internal bandages that deliver drugs directly to the heart to cartilage patches and needle-free sutures.
“Cardiac and cartilage tissues are similar in that they have very limited capacity to repair themselves. When they’re damaged, there is no turning back,” said senior author Jason Burdick, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at CU Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute. “By developing new, more resilient materials to enhance that repair process, we can have a big impact on patients.”
Worm ‘blobs’ as inspiration
Historically, biomedical devices have been created via molding or casting, techniques which work well for mass production of identical implants but aren’t practical when it comes to personalizing those implants for specific patients. In recent years, 3D printing has opened a world of new possibilities for medical applications by allowing researchers to make materials in many shapes and structures.
Unlike typical printers, which simply place ink on paper, 3D printers deposit layer after layer of plastics, metals or even living cells to create multidimensional objects.
One specific material, known as a hydrogel (the stuff that contact lenses are made of), has been a favorite prospect for fabricating artificial tissues, organs and implants.
But getting these from the lab to the clinic has been tough because traditional 3D-printed hydrogels tend to either break when stretched, crack under pressure or are too stiff to mold around tissues.
“Imagine if you had a rigid plastic adhered to your heart. It wouldn’t deform as your heart beats,” said Burdick. “It would just fracture.”
To achieve both strength and elasticity within 3D printed hydrogels, Burdick and his colleagues took a cue from worms, which repeatedly tangle and untangle themselves around one another in three-dimensional “worm blobs” that have both solid and liquid-like properties. Previous research has shown that incorporating similarly intertwined chains of molecules, known as “entanglements,” can make them tougher.
Their new printing method, known as CLEAR (for Continuous-curing after Light Exposure Aided by Redox initiation), follows a series of steps to entangle long molecules inside 3D-printed materials much like those intertwined worms.
When the team stretched and weight-loaded those materials in the lab (one researcher even ran over a sample with her bike) they found them to be exponentially tougher than materials printed with a standard method of 3D printing known as Digital Light Processing (DLP). Better yet: They also conformed and stuck to animal tissues and organs.
“We can now 3D print adhesive materials that are strong enough to mechanically support tissue,” said co-first author Matt Davidson, a research associate in the Burdick Lab. “We have never been able to do that before.”
Revolutionizing care
Burdick imagines a day when such 3D-printed materials could be used to repair defects in hearts, deliver tissue-regenerating drugs directly to organs or cartilage, restrain bulging discs or even stitch people up in the operating room without inflicting tissue damage like a needle and suture can.
His lab has filed for a provisional patent and plans to launch more studies soon to better understand how tissues react to the presence of such materials.
But the team stresses that their new method could have impacts far beyond medicine—in research and manufacturing too. For instance, their method eliminates the need for additional energy to cure, or harden, parts, making the 3D printing process more environmentally friendly.
“This is a simple 3D processing method that people could ultimately use in their own academic labs as well as in industry to improve the mechanical properties of materials for a wide variety of applications,” said first author Abhishek Dhand, a researcher in the Burdick Lab and doctoral candidate in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “It solves a big problem for 3D printing.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Additive manufacturing of highly entangled polymer networks by Abhishek P. Dhand, Matthew D. Davidson, Hannah M. Zlotnick, Thomas J. Kolibaba, Jason P. Killgore, and Jason A. Burdick. Science 1 Aug 2024 Vol 385, Issue 6708 pp. 566-572 DOI: 10.1126/science.adn692
Am I the only one wondering what happens if your textiles start dissolving early? This excerpt from a June 17, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily announcing the research does not address my quandary,
Introducing the fashion of the future: A T-shirt that you can wear a few times, then, when you get bored with it, dissolve and recycle to make a new shirt.
Researchers at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder are now one step closer to that goal. In a new study, the team of engineers and designers developed a DIY machine that spins textile fibers made of materials like sustainably sourced gelatin. The group’s “biofibers” feel a bit like flax fiber and dissolve in hot water in minutes to an hour.
…
The quandary is addressed in a manner of speaking in a June 17, 2024 University of Colorado at Boulder news release (also on EurekAlert) by Daniel Strain, which originated the news item, that also gives more context for the research and explains what the researchers are hoping to achieve, Note: A link has been removed,
“When you don’t want these textiles anymore, you can dissolve them and recycle the gelatin to make more fibers,” said Michael Rivera, a co-author of the new research and assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science.
The study tackles a growing problem around the world: In 2018 alone, people in the United States added more than 11 million tons of textiles to landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency—nearly 8% of all municipal solid waste produced that year.
The researchers envision a different path for fashion.
Their machine is small enough to fit on a desk and cost just $560 to build. Lázaro Vásquez [Eldy Lázaro Vásquez, doctoral student in the ATLAS Institute,] hopes the device will help designers around the world experiment with making their own biofibers.
“You could customize fibers with the strength and elasticity you want, the color you want,” she said. “With this kind of prototyping machine, anyone can make fibers. You don’t need the big machines that are only in university chemistry departments.”
Spinning threads
The study arrives as fashionistas, roboticists and more are embracing a trend known as “smart textiles.” Levi’s Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google, for example, looks like a denim coat but includes sensors that can connect to your smartphone.
But such clothing of the future comes with a downside, Rivera said:
“That jacket isn’t really recyclable. It’s difficult to separate the denim from the copper yarns and the electronics.”
To imagine a new way of making clothes, the team started with gelatin. This springy protein is common in the bones and hooves of many animals, including pigs and cows. Every year, meat producers throw away large volumes of gelatin that doesn’t meet requirements for cosmetics or food products like Jell-O. (Lázaro Vásquez bought her own gelatin, which comes as a powder, from a local butcher shop).
She and her colleagues decided to turn that waste into wearable treasure.
The group’s machine uses a plastic syringe to heat up and squeeze out droplets of a liquid gelatin mixture. Two sets of rollers in the machine then tug on the gelatin, stretching it out into long, skinny fibers—not unlike a spider spinning a web from silk. In the process, the fibers also pass through liquid baths where the researchers can introduce bio-based dyes or other additives to the material. Adding a little bit of genipin, an extract from fruit, for example, makes the fibers stronger.
Dissolving duds
Lázaro Vásquez said designers may be able to do anything they can imagine with these sorts of textiles.
As a proof of concept, the researchers made small sensors out of gelatin fibers and cotton and conductive yarns, similar to the makeup of a Jacquard jacket. The team then submerged these patches in warm water. The gelatin dissolved, releasing the yarns for easy recycling and reuse.
Designers could tweak the chemistry of the fibers to make them a little more resilient, Lázaro Vásquez said—you wouldn’t want your jacket to disappear in the rain. [emphases mine] They could also play around with spinning similar fibers from other natural ingredients. Those materials include chitin, a component of crab shells, or agar-agar, which comes from algae.
“We’re trying to think about the whole lifecycle of our textiles,” Lázaro Vásquez said. “That begins with where the material is coming from. Can we get it from something that normally goes to waste?”
A September 20, 2021 news item on phys.org announces research investigating the heating of electronics at the nanoscale,
A team of physicists at CU Boulder [University of Colorado at Boulder] has solved the mystery behind a perplexing phenomenon in the nano realm: why some ultra-small heat sources cool down faster if you pack them closer together. The findings, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), could one day help the tech industry design faster electronic devices that overheat less.
“Often, heat is a challenging consideration in designing electronics. You build a device then discover that it’s heating up faster than desired,” said study co-author Joshua Knobloch, postdoctoral research associate at JILA, a joint research institute between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “Our goal is to understand the fundamental physics involved so we can engineer future devices to efficiently manage the flow of heat.”
The research began with an unexplained observation: In 2015, researchers led by physicists Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn at JILA were experimenting with bars of metal that were many times thinner than the width of a human hair on a silicon base. When they heated those bars up with a laser, something strange occurred.
“They behaved very counterintuitively,” Knobloch said. “These nano-scale heat sources do not usually dissipate heat efficiently. But if you pack them close together, they cool down much more quickly.”
Now, the researchers know why it happens.
In the new study, they used computer-based simulations to track the passage of heat from their nano-sized bars. They discovered that when they placed the heat sources close together, the vibrations of energy they produced began to bounce off each other, scattering heat away and cooling the bars down.
The group’s results highlight a major challenge in designing the next generation of tiny devices, such as microprocessors or quantum computer chips: When you shrink down to very small scales, heat does not always behave the way you think it should.
Atom by atom
The transmission of heat in devices matters, the researchers added. Even minute defects in the design of electronics like computer chips can allow temperature to build up, adding wear and tear to a device. As tech companies strive to produce smaller and smaller electronics, they’ll need to pay more attention than ever before to phonons—vibrations of atoms that carry heat in solids.
“Heat flow involves very complex processes, making it hard to control,” Knobloch said. “But if we can understand how phonons behave on the small scale, then we can tailor their transport, allowing us to build more efficient devices.”
To do just that, Murnane and Kapteyn and their team of experimental physicists joined forces with a group of theorists led by Mahmoud Hussein, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. His group specializes in simulating, or modeling, the motion of phonons.
“At the atomic scale, the very nature of heat transfer emerges in a new light,” said Hussein who also has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Physics.
The researchers, essentially, recreated their experiment from several years before, but this time, entirely on a computer. They modeled a series of silicon bars, laid side by side like the slats in a train track and heated them up.
The simulations were so detailed, Knobloch said, that the team could follow the behavior of each and every atom in the model—millions of them in all—from start to finish.
“We were really pushing the limits of memory of the Summit Supercomputer at CU Boulder,” he said.
Directing heat
The technique paid off. The researchers found, for example, that when they spaced their silicon bars far enough apart, heat tended to escape away from those materials in a predictable way. The energy leaked from the bars and into the material below them, dissipating in every direction.
When the bars got closer together, however, something else happened. As the heat from those sources scattered, it effectively forced that energy to flow more intensely away from the sources—like a crowd of people in a stadium jostling against each other and eventually leaping out of the exit. The team denoted this phenomenon “directional thermal channeling.”
“This phenomenon increases the transport of heat down into the substrate and away from the heat sources,” Knobloch said.
The researchers suspect that engineers could one day tap into this unusual behavior to gain a better handle on how heat flows in small electronics—directing that energy along a desired path, instead of letting it run wild and free.
For now, the researchers see the latest study as what scientists from different disciplines can do when they work together.
“This project was such an exciting collaboration between science and engineering—where advanced computational analysis methods developed by Mahmoud’s group were critical for understanding new materials behavior uncovered earlier by our group using new extreme ultraviolet quantum light sources,” said Murnane, also a professor of physics.
…
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Directional thermal channeling: A phenomenon triggered by tight packing of heat sources by Hossein Honarvar, Joshua L. Knobloch, Travis D. Frazer, Begoña Abad, Brendan McBennett, Mahmoud I. Hussein, Henry C. Kapteyn, Margaret M. Murnane, and Jorge N. Hernandez-Charpak. PNAS October 5, 2021 118 (40) e2109056118; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109056118
Nanobots/nanorobots/nanoswimmers or whatever they’re called, could prove to be quite useful for environmental remediation efforts or medical delivery systems according to a June 29, 2021 news item on Nanowerk (Note: One link has been removed),
CU Boulder [University of Colorado at Boulder] researchers have discovered that minuscule, self-propelled particles called “nanoswimmers” can escape from mazes as much as 20 times faster than other, passive particles, paving the way for their use in everything from industrial clean-ups to medication delivery.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“Mechanisms of transport enhancement for self-propelled nanoswimmers in a porous matrix”), describe how these tiny synthetic nanorobots are incredibly effective at escaping cavities within maze-like environments. These nanoswimmers could one day be used to remediate contaminated soil, improve water filtration or even deliver drugs to targeted areas of the body, like within dense tissues.
“This is the discovery of an entirely new phenomenon that points to a broad potential range of applications,” said Daniel Schwartz, senior author of the paper and Glenn L. Murphy Endowed Professor of chemical and biological engineering.
These nanoswimmers came to the attention of the theoretical physics community about 20 years ago, and people imagined a wealth of real-world applications, according to Schwartz. But unfortunately these tangible applications have not yet been realized, in part because it’s been quite difficult to observe and model their movement in relevant environments–until now.
These nanoswimmers, also called Janus particles (named after a Roman two-headed god), are tiny spherical particles composed of polymer or silica, engineered with different chemical properties on each side of the sphere. One hemisphere promotes chemical reactions to occur, but not the other. This creates a chemical field which allows the particle to take energy from the environment and convert it into directional motion–also known as self-propulsion.
“In biology and living organisms, cell propulsion is the dominant mechanism that causes motion to occur, and yet, in engineered applications, it’s rarely used. Our work suggests that there is a lot we can do with self-propulsion,” said Schwartz.
In contrast, passive particles which move about randomly (a kind of motion known as Brownian motion) are known as Brownian particles. They’re named after 19th century scientist Robert Brown, who studied such things as the random motion of pollen grains suspended in water.
The researchers converted these passive Brownian particles into Janus particles (nanoswimmers) for this research. Then they made these self-propelled nanoswimmers try to move through a maze, made of a porous medium, and compared how efficiently and effectively they found escape routes compared to the passive, Brownian particles.
The results were shocking, even to the researchers.
The Janus particles were incredibly effective at escaping cavities within the maze–as much as 20 times faster than the Brownian particles–because they moved strategically along the cavity walls searching for holes, which allowed them to find the exits very quickly. Their self-propulsion also appeared to give them a boost of energy needed to pass through the exit holes within the maze.
“We know we have a lot of applications for nanorobots, especially in very confined environments, but we didn’t really know how they move and what the advantages are compared to traditional Brownian particles. That’s why we started a comparison between these two,” said Haichao Wu, lead author of the paper and graduate student in chemical and biological engineering. “And we found that nanoswimmers are able to use a totally different way to search around these maze environments.”
While these particles are incredibly small, around 250 nanometers–just wider than a human hair (160 nanometers) but still much, much smaller than the head of a pin (1-2 millimeters)–the work is scalable. This means that these particles could navigate and permeate spaces as microscopic as human tissue to carry cargo and deliver drugs, as well as through soil underground or beaches of sand to remove unwanted pollutants.
Swarming nanoswimmers
The next step in this line of research is to understand how nanoswimmers behave in groups within confined environments, or in combination with passive particles.
“In open environments, nanoswimmers are known to display emergent behavior–behavior that is more than the sum of its parts–that mimics the swarming motion of flocks of birds or schools of fish. That’s been a lot of the impetus for studying them,” said Schwartz.
One of the main obstacles to reaching this goal is the difficulty involved in being able to observe and understand the 3D movement of these tiny particles deep within a material comprising complex interconnected spaces.
Wu overcame this hurdle by using refractive index liquid in the porous medium, which is liquid that affects how fast light travels through a material. This made the maze essentially invisible, while allowing the observation of 3D particle motion using a technique known as double-helix point spread function microscopy.
This enabled Wu to track three-dimensional trajectories of the particles and create visual representations, a major advancement from typical 2D modeling of nanoparticles. Without this advancement, it would not be possible to better understand the movement and behavior of either individuals or groups of nanoswimmers.
“This paper is the first step: It provides a model system and the imaging platform that enables us to answer these questions,” said Wu. “The next step is to use this model with a larger population of nanoswimmers, to study how they are able to interact with each other in a confined environment.”
This is exciting provided they can scale up the metamaterial for industrial use. A Feb. 9, 2017 news item on Nanowerk announces a new metamaterial that could change air conditioning from the University of Colorado at Boulder (Note: A link has been removed),
A team of University of Colorado Boulder engineers has developed a scalable manufactured metamaterial — an engineered material with extraordinary properties not found in nature — to act as a kind of air conditioning system for structures. It has the ability to cool objects even under direct sunlight with zero energy and water consumption.
When applied to a surface, the metamaterial film cools the object underneath by efficiently reflecting incoming solar energy back into space while simultaneously allowing the surface to shed its own heat in the form of infrared thermal radiation.
The new material, which is described today in the journal Science (“Scalable-manufactured randomized glass-polymer hybrid metamaterial for daytime radiative cooling”), could provide an eco-friendly means of supplementary cooling for thermoelectric power plants, which currently require large amounts of water and electricity to maintain the operating temperatures of their machinery.
The researchers’ glass-polymer hybrid material measures just 50 micrometers thick — slightly thicker than the aluminum foil found in a kitchen — and can be manufactured economically on rolls, making it a potentially viable large-scale technology for both residential and commercial applications.
“We feel that this low-cost manufacturing process will be transformative for real-world applications of this radiative cooling technology,” said Xiaobo Yin, co-director of the research and an assistant professor who holds dual appointments in CU Boulder’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Program. Yin received DARPA’s [US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] Young Faculty Award in 2015.
The material takes advantage of passive radiative cooling, the process by which objects naturally shed heat in the form of infrared radiation, without consuming energy. Thermal radiation provides some natural nighttime cooling and is used for residential cooling in some areas, but daytime cooling has historically been more of a challenge. For a structure exposed to sunlight, even a small amount of directly-absorbed solar energy is enough to negate passive radiation.
The challenge for the CU Boulder researchers, then, was to create a material that could provide a one-two punch: reflect any incoming solar rays back into the atmosphere while still providing a means of escape for infrared radiation. To solve this, the researchers embedded visibly-scattering but infrared-radiant glass microspheres into a polymer film. They then added a thin silver coating underneath in order to achieve maximum spectral reflectance.
“Both the glass-polymer metamaterial formation and the silver coating are manufactured at scale on roll-to-roll processes,” added Ronggui Yang, also a professor of mechanical engineering and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
“Just 10 to 20 square meters of this material on the rooftop could nicely cool down a single-family house in summer,” said Gang Tan, an associate professor in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering and a co-author of the paper.
In addition to being useful for cooling of buildings and power plants, the material could also help improve the efficiency and lifetime of solar panels. In direct sunlight, panels can overheat to temperatures that hamper their ability to convert solar rays into electricity.
“Just by applying this material to the surface of a solar panel, we can cool the panel and recover an additional one to two percent of solar efficiency,” said Yin. “That makes a big difference at scale.”
The engineers have applied for a patent for the technology and are working with CU Boulder’s Technology Transfer Office to explore potential commercial applications. They plan to create a 200-square-meter “cooling farm” prototype in Boulder in 2017.
The invention is the result of a $3 million grant awarded in 2015 to Yang, Yin and Tang by the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
“The key advantage of this technology is that it works 24/7 with no electricity or water usage,” said Yang “We’re excited about the opportunity to explore potential uses in the power industry, aerospace, agriculture and more.”
Members of the research team show off the metamaterial (?) Courtesy: University of Colorado at Boulder
I added the caption to this image, which was on the University of Colorado at Boulder’s home page where it accompanied the news release headline on the rotating banner.
