Tag Archives: US Office of Naval Research

3D-printed ‘smart helmets’ for the military

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Caption: The Rice University-designed smart helmet is intended to modernize standard-issue military helmets by 3D-printing a nanomaterial-enhanced exoskeleton with embedded sensors to actively protect the brain against kinetic or directed-energy effects. Credit: Rice University

Hopefully this will limit the number of head injuries suffered by soldiers.

Some years ago I was at dinner with friends when one of them, a doctor at the local hospital, told me that the Canadian military, which was in Afghanistan at the time, was dealing with a high number of head injury cases, in part due to the soldiers’ own protective gear.

For example, the protective helmet meant you were less likely to receive a catastrophic injury to your cranium (e.g., metal cracking through bone) but your head would be shaken and that isn’t good for anyone’s brain.

It would seem this project at Rice University (Texas, US) is designed to limit the problem of your own protective gear causing injury, from a November 10, 2021 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert), Note: Links have been removed,

Rice University researchers have received $1.3 million from the Office of Naval Research through the Defense Research University Instrumentation Program to create the world’s first printable military “smart helmet” using industrial-grade 3D printers. 

Led by principal investigator Paul Cherukuri, executive director of Rice’s Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, the Smart Helmet program aims to modernize standard-issue military helmets by 3D-printing a nanomaterial-enhanced exoskeleton with embedded sensors to actively protect the brain against kinetic or directed-energy effects. 

Rice will utilize Carbon Inc.’s L1 printer to develop a strong-but-light military-grade helmet that incorporates advances in materials, image processing, artificial intelligence, haptic feedback and energy storage. The printer enables rapid prototyping that in turn simplifies the process of incorporating the sensors, cameras, batteries and wiring harnesses the program requires, Cherukuri said. 

“Current helmets have evolved little since the last century and are still heavy, bulky, passive devices,” he said. “Because of advances in sensors and additive manufacturing, we’re now reimagining the helmet as a 3D-printed, AI-enabled, ‘always-on’ wearable that detects threats near or far and is capable of launching countermeasures to protect soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Essentially, we’re building J.A.R.V.I.S.”

The Smart Helmet program will use technology drawn from projects like the FlatCam, a system developed by co-investigator and electrical and computer engineer Ashok Veeraraghavan and his colleagues that incorporates sophisticated image processing to eliminate the need for bulky lenses, as well as Cherukuri’s Teslaphoresis, a kind of tractor beam for nanomaterials that could help create physical and electromagnetic shields inside the helmets. 

“A smart helmet task force has been assembled from some of the finest minds at Rice to tackle the challenge of creating a self-contained, intelligent system that protects the warfighter at all times,” Cherukuri said. The task force includes the labs of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, civil and environmental engineer and Rice Provost Reginald DesRoches, mechanical engineer Marcia O’Malley, chemist James Tour and Veeraraghavan.

While the location of the L1 has yet to be determined, a Carbon M2 printer will be located at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), where it will be available for projects other than the helmet. Rice undergraduates who design and build their mandated capstone projects at the OEDK are taking part in the helmet project, working alongside graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to develop the heads-up display.   

“We’ve got a lot of innovative tech in university labs that has never seen the light of day,” Cherukuri said. “We’re simply developing that technology into a device that gives the men and women protecting our country a real chance at coming home safe and sound. This is for them.”

How small can a carbon nanotube get before it stops being ‘electrical’?

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Research, which began as an attempt to get reproducible electronics (?) measurements, yielded some unexpected results according ta January 3, 2018 news item on phys.org,

Carbon nanotubes bound for electronics not only need to be as clean as possible to maximize their utility in next-generation nanoscale devices, but contact effects may limit how small a nano device can be, according to researchers at the Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University [UK] in collaboration with researchers at Rice University [US].

ESRI Director Andrew Barron, also a professor at Rice University in the USA, and his team have figured out how to get nanotubes clean enough to obtain reproducible electronic measurements and in the process not only explained why the electrical properties of nanotubes have historically been so difficult to measure consistently, but have shown that there may be a limit to how “nano” future electronic devices can be using carbon nanotubes.

Swansea University Issued a January 3, 2018 press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains the work in more detail,

Like any normal wire, semiconducting nanotubes are progressively more resistant to current along their length. But conductivity measurements of nanotubes over the years have been anything but consistent. The ESRI team wanted to know why.

“We are interested in the creation of nanotube based conductors, and while people have been able to make wires their conduction has not met expectations. We were interested in determining the basic sconce behind the variability observed by other researchers.”

They discovered that hard-to-remove contaminants — leftover iron catalyst, carbon and water — could easily skew the results of conductivity tests. Burning them away, Barron said, creates new possibilities for carbon nanotubes in nanoscale electronics.

The new study appears in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

The researchers first made multiwalled carbon nanotubes between 40 and 200 nanometers in diameter and up to 30 microns long. They then either heated the nanotubes in a vacuum or bombarded them with argon ions to clean their surfaces.

They tested individual nanotubes the same way one would test any electrical conductor: By touching them with two probes to see how much current passes through the material from one tip to the other. In this case, their tungsten probes were attached to a scanning tunneling microscope.

In clean nanotubes, resistance got progressively stronger as the distance increased, as it should. But the results were skewed when the probes encountered surface contaminants, which increased the electric field strength at the tip. And when measurements were taken within 4 microns of each other, regions of depleted conductivity caused by contaminants overlapped, further scrambling the results.

“We think this is why there’s such inconsistency in the literature,” Barron said.

“If nanotubes are to be the next generation lightweight conductor, then consistent results, batch-to-batch, and sample-to-sample, is needed for devices such as motors and generators as well as power systems.”

Annealing the nanotubes in a vacuum above 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit) reduced surface contamination, but not enough to eliminate inconsistent results, they found. Argon ion bombardment also cleaned the tubes, but led to an increase in defects that degrade conductivity.

Ultimately they discovered vacuum annealing nanotubes at 500 degrees Celsius (932 Fahrenheit) reduced contamination enough to accurately measure resistance, they reported.

To now, Barron said, engineers who use nanotube fibers or films in devices modify the material through doping or other means to get the conductive properties they require. But if the source nanotubes are sufficiently decontaminated, they should be able to get the right conductivity by simply putting their contacts in the right spot.

“A key result of our work was that if contacts on a nanotube are less than 1 micron apart, the electronic properties of the nanotube changes from conductor to semiconductor, due to the presence of overlapping depletion zones” said Barron, “this has a potential limiting factor on the size of nanotube based electronic devices – this would limit the application of Moore’s law to nanotube devices.”

Chris Barnett of Swansea is lead author of the paper. Co-authors are Cathren Gowenlock and Kathryn Welsby, and Rice alumnus Alvin Orbaek White of Swansea. Barron is the Sêr Cymru Chair of Low Carbon Energy and Environment at Swansea and the Charles W. Duncan Jr.–Welch Professor of Chemistry and a professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice.

The Welsh Government Sêr Cymru National Research Network in Advanced Engineering and Materials, the Sêr Cymru Chair Program, the Office of Naval Research and the Robert A. Welch Foundation supported the research.

Rice University has published a January 4, 2018 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert), which is almost (95%) identical to the press release from Swansea. That’s a bit unusual as collaborating institutions usually like to focus on their unique contributions to the research, hence, multiple news/press releases.

Dexter Johnson, in a January 11, 2018 post on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website,  adds a detail or two while writing in an accessible style.

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

Spatial and Contamination-Dependent Electrical Properties of Carbon Nanotubes by Chris J. Barnett, Cathren E. Gowenlock, Kathryn Welsby, Alvin Orbaek White, and Andrew R. Barron. Nano Lett., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b03390 Publication Date (Web): December 19, 2017

Copyright © 2017 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Yarns that harvest and generate energy

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The researchers involved in this work are confident enough about their prospects that they will be  patenting their research into yarns. From an August 25, 2017 news item on Nanowerk,

An international research team led by scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and Hanyang University in South Korea has developed high-tech yarns that generate electricity when they are stretched or twisted.

In a study published in the Aug. 25 [2017] issue of the journal Science (“Harvesting electrical energy from carbon nanotube yarn twist”), researchers describe “twistron” yarns and their possible applications, such as harvesting energy from the motion of ocean waves or from temperature fluctuations. When sewn into a shirt, these yarns served as a self-powered breathing monitor.

“The easiest way to think of twistron harvesters is, you have a piece of yarn, you stretch it, and out comes electricity,” said Dr. Carter Haines, associate research professor in the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas and co-lead author of the article. The article also includes researchers from South Korea, Virginia Tech, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and China.

An August 25, 2017 University of Texas at Dallas news release, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

Yarns Based on Nanotechnology

The yarns are constructed from carbon nanotubes, which are hollow cylinders of carbon 10,000 times smaller in diameter than a human hair. The researchers first twist-spun the nanotubes into high-strength, lightweight yarns. To make the yarns highly elastic, they introduced so much twist that the yarns coiled like an over-twisted rubber band.

In order to generate electricity, the yarns must be either submerged in or coated with an ionically conducting material, or electrolyte, which can be as simple as a mixture of ordinary table salt and water.

“Fundamentally, these yarns are supercapacitors,” said Dr. Na Li, a research scientist at the NanoTech Institute and co-lead author of the study. “In a normal capacitor, you use energy — like from a battery — to add charges to the capacitor. But in our case, when you insert the carbon nanotube yarn into an electrolyte bath, the yarns are charged by the electrolyte itself. No external battery, or voltage, is needed.”

When a harvester yarn is twisted or stretched, the volume of the carbon nanotube yarn decreases, bringing the electric charges on the yarn closer together and increasing their energy, Haines said. This increases the voltage associated with the charge stored in the yarn, enabling the harvesting of electricity.

Stretching the coiled twistron yarns 30 times a second generated 250 watts per kilogram of peak electrical power when normalized to the harvester’s weight, said Dr. Ray Baughman, director of the NanoTech Institute and a corresponding author of the study.

“Although numerous alternative harvesters have been investigated for many decades, no other reported harvester provides such high electrical power or energy output per cycle as ours for stretching rates between a few cycles per second and 600 cycles per second.”

Lab Tests Show Potential Applications

In the lab, the researchers showed that a twistron yarn weighing less than a housefly could power a small LED, which lit up each time the yarn was stretched.

To show that twistrons can harvest waste thermal energy from the environment, Li connected a twistron yarn to a polymer artificial muscle that contracts and expands when heated and cooled. The twistron harvester converted the mechanical energy generated by the polymer muscle to electrical energy.

“There is a lot of interest in using waste energy to power the Internet of Things, such as arrays of distributed sensors,” Li said. “Twistron technology might be exploited for such applications where changing batteries is impractical.”

The researchers also sewed twistron harvesters into a shirt. Normal breathing stretched the yarn and generated an electrical signal, demonstrating its potential as a self-powered respiration sensor.

“Electronic textiles are of major commercial interest, but how are you going to power them?” Baughman said. “Harvesting electrical energy from human motion is one strategy for eliminating the need for batteries. Our yarns produced over a hundred times higher electrical power per weight when stretched compared to other weavable fibers reported in the literature.”

Electricity from Ocean Waves

“In the lab we showed that our energy harvesters worked using a solution of table salt as the electrolyte,” said Baughman, who holds the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. “But we wanted to show that they would also work in ocean water, which is chemically more complex.”

In a proof-of-concept demonstration, co-lead author Dr. Shi Hyeong Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at the NanoTech Institute, waded into the frigid surf off the east coast of South Korea to deploy a coiled twistron in the sea. He attached a 10 centimeter-long yarn, weighing only 1 milligram (about the weight of a mosquito), between a balloon and a sinker that rested on the seabed.

Every time an ocean wave arrived, the balloon would rise, stretching the yarn up to 25 percent, thereby generating measured electricity.

Even though the investigators used very small amounts of twistron yarn in the current study, they have shown that harvester performance is scalable, both by increasing twistron diameter and by operating many yarns in parallel.

“If our twistron harvesters could be made less expensively, they might ultimately be able to harvest the enormous amount of energy available from ocean waves,” Baughman said. “However, at present these harvesters are most suitable for powering sensors and sensor communications. Based on demonstrated average power output, just 31 milligrams of carbon nanotube yarn harvester could provide the electrical energy needed to transmit a 2-kilobyte packet of data over a 100-meter radius every 10 seconds for the Internet of Things.”

Researchers from the UT Dallas Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and Lintec of America’s Nano-Science & Technology Center also participated in the study.

The investigators have filed a patent on the technology.

In the U.S., the research was funded by the Air Force, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, NASA, the Office of Naval Research and the Robert A. Welch Foundation. In Korea, the research was supported by the Korea-U.S. Air Force Cooperation Program and the Creative Research Initiative Center for Self-powered Actuation of the National Research Foundation and the Ministry of Science.

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

Harvesting electrical energy from carbon nanotube yarn twist by Shi Hyeong Kim, Carter S. Haines, Na Li, Keon Jung Kim, Tae Jin Mun, Changsoon Choi, Jiangtao Di, Young Jun Oh, Juan Pablo Oviedo, Julia Bykova, Shaoli Fang, Nan Jiang, Zunfeng Liu, Run Wang, Prashant Kumar, Rui Qiao, Shashank Priya, Kyeongjae Cho, Moon Kim, Matthew Steven Lucas, Lawrence F. Drummy, Benji Maruyama, Dong Youn Lee, Xavier Lepró, Enlai Gao, Dawood Albarq, Raquel Ovalle-Robles, Seon Jeong Kim, Ray H. Baughman. Science 25 Aug 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6353, pp. 773-778 DOI: 10.1126/science.aam8771

This paper is behind a paywall.

Dexter Johnson in an Aug. 25, 2017 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) delves further into the research,

…

“Basically what’s happening is when we stretch the yarn, we’re getting a change in capacitance of the yarn. It’s that change that allows us to get energy out,” explains Carter Haines, associate research professor at UT Dallas and co-lead author of the paper describing the research, in an interview with IEEE Spectrum.

This makes it similar in many ways to other types of energy harvesters. For instance, in other research, it has been demonstrated—with sheets of rubber with coated electrodes on both sides—that you can increase the capacitance of a material when you stretch it and it becomes thinner. As a result, if you have charge on that capacitor, you can change the voltage associated with that charge.

“We’re more or less exploiting the same effect but what we’re doing differently is we’re using an electric chemical cell to do this,” says Haines. “So we’re not changing double layer capacitance in normal parallel plate capacitors. But we’re actually changing the electric chemical capacitance on the surface of a super capacitor yarn.”

While there are other capacitance-based energy harvesters, those other devices require extremely high voltages to work because they’re using parallel plate capacitors, according to Haines.

…

Dexter asks good questions and his post is very informative.

Synthetic biowire for nanoelectronics

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Apparently this biowire derived by synthetic biology processes can make nanoelectronics a greener affair. From a July 14, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report in the current issue of Small that they have genetically designed a new strain of bacteria that spins out extremely thin and highly conductive wires made up of solely of non-toxic, natural amino acids.

A July 14, 2016 University of Massachusetts at Amherst news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more information,

Researchers led by microbiologist Derek Lovley say the wires, which rival the thinnest wires known to man, are produced from renewable, inexpensive feedstocks and avoid the harsh chemical processes typically used to produce nanoelectronic materials.

Lovley says, “New sources of electronic materials are needed to meet the increasing demand for making smaller, more powerful electronic devices in a sustainable way.” The ability to mass-produce such thin conductive wires with this sustainable technology has many potential applications in electronic devices, functioning not only as wires, but also transistors and capacitors. Proposed applications include biocompatible sensors, computing devices, and as components of solar panels.

This advance began a decade ago, when Lovley and colleagues discovered that Geobacter, a common soil microorganism, could produce “microbial nanowires,” electrically conductive protein filaments that help the microbe grow on the iron minerals abundant in soil. These microbial nanowires were conductive enough to meet the bacterium’s needs, but their conductivity was well below the conductivities of organic wires that chemists could synthesize.

“As we learned more about how the microbial nanowires worked we realized that it might be possible to improve on Nature’s design,” says Lovley. “We knew that one class of amino acids was important for the conductivity, so we rearranged these amino acids to produce a synthetic nanowire that we thought might be more conductive.”

The trick they discovered to accomplish this was to introduce tryptophan, an amino acid not present in the natural nanowires. Tryptophan is a common aromatic amino acid notorious for causing drowsiness after eating Thanksgiving turkey. However, it is also highly effective at the nanoscale in transporting electrons.

“We designed a synthetic nanowire in which a tryptophan was inserted where nature had used a phenylalanine and put in another tryptophan for one of the tyrosines. We hoped to get lucky and that Geobacter might still form nanowires from this synthetic peptide and maybe double the nanowire conductivity,” says Lovley.

The results greatly exceeded the scientists’ expectations. They genetically engineered a strain of Geobacter and manufactured large quantities of the synthetic nanowires 2000 times more conductive than the natural biological product. An added bonus is that the synthetic nanowires, which Lovley refers to as “biowire,” had a diameter only half that of the natural product.

“We were blown away by this result,” says Lovley. The conductivity of biowire exceeds that of many types of chemically-produced organic nanowires with similar diameters. The extremely thin diameter of 1.5 nanometers (over 60,000 times thinner than a human hair) means that thousands of the wires can easily be packed into a very small space.

The added benefit is that making biowire does not require any of the dangerous chemicals that are needed for synthesis of other nanowires. Also, biowire contains no toxic components. “Geobacter can be grown on cheap renewable organic feedstocks so it is a very ‘green’ process,” he notes. And, although the biowire is made out of protein, it is extremely durable. In fact, Lovley’s lab had to work for months to establish a method to break it down.

“It’s quite an unusual protein,” Lovley says. “This may be just the beginning” he adds. Researchers in his lab recently produced more than 20 other Geobacter strains, each producing a distinct biowire variant with new amino acid combinations. He notes, “I am hoping that our initial success will attract more funding to accelerate the discovery process. We are hoping that we can modify biowire in other ways to expand its potential applications.”

As it often does, funding provides some notes of interest,

This research was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center and the UMass Amherst Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing.

Caption: Synthetic biowire are making an electrical connection between two electrodes. Researchers led by microbiologist Derek Lovely at UMass Amherst say the wires, which rival the thinnest wires known to man, are produced from renewable, inexpensive feedstocks and avoid the harsh chemical processes typically used to produce nanoelectronic materials. Credit: UMass Amherst

Caption: Synthetic biowire are making an electrical connection between two electrodes. Researchers led by microbiologist Derek Lovely at UMass Amherst say the wires, which rival the thinnest wires known to man, are produced from renewable, inexpensive feedstocks and avoid the harsh chemical processes typically used to produce nanoelectronic materials. Credit: UMass Amherst

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

Synthetic Biological Protein Nanowires with High Conductivity by Yang Tan, Ramesh Y. Adhikari, Nikhil S. Malvankar, Shuang Pi, Joy E. Ward, Trevor L. Woodard, Kelly P. Nevin, Qiangfei Xia, Mark T. Tuominen, and Derek R. Lovley. Small DOI: 10.1002/smll.201601112 Version of Record online: 13 JUL 2016

© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

US Navy invests in graphene

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More usually, I feature research from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Progects Agency) which I think belongs to the US Army and the US Air Force Research Office. The US Navy has featured here only once before (a Nov. 1, 2011 posting) and even then it was tangentially. I think it’s long past time that the US Navy gets some attention.

A July 22, 2015 news item on Nanowerk explains the Navy’s interest in electricity and graphene,

The U.S. Navy distributes electricity aboard most of its ships like a power company. It relies on conductors, transformers and other bulky infrastructure.

The setup works, but with powerful next generation weapons on the horizon and the omnipresent goal of energy efficiency, the Navy is seeking alternatives to conventional power control systems.

One option involves using graphene, which, since its discovery in 2004, has become the material of choice for researchers working to improve everything from solar cells to smartphone batteries.

Accordingly, the Office of Naval Research has awarded University at Buffalo engineers an $800,000 grant to develop narrow strips of graphene called nanoribbons that may someday revolutionize how power is controlled in ships, smartphones and other electronic devices.

A July 20, 2015 University of Buffalo news release by Cory Nealon, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

“We need to develop new nanomaterials capable of handling greater amounts of energy densities in much smaller devices. Graphene nanoribbons show remarkable promise in this endeavor,” says Cemal Basaran, PhD, a professor in UB’s Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the grant’s principal investigator.

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms packed together like a honeycomb. It is extremely thin, light and strong. It’s also the best known conductor of heat and electricity.

“The beauty of graphene is that it can be grown like biological organisms as opposed to manufacturing materials with traditional techniques,” says Basaran, director of UB’s Electronic Packaging Laboratory and a researcher in UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Materials Informatics. “These bio-inspired materials allow us to control their atomic organizations like controlling genetic DNA makeup of a lab-grown cell.”

While promising, researchers are just beginning to understand graphene and its potential uses. One area of interest is power control systems.

Like overhead power lines, most ships rely on copper or other metals to move electricity. Unfortunately, this process is relatively inefficient; electrons bash into each other and create heat in a process called Joule heating.

“You lose a great deal of energy that way,” Basaran says. “With graphene, you avoid those collisions because it conducts electricity in a different process, known as semi-ballistic conduction. It’s like a high-speed bullet train versus bumper cars.”

Another limitation of metal-based power distribution is the bulky infrastructure – transistors, copper wires, transformers, etc. – needed to move electricity. Whether in a ship or tablet computer, the components take up space and add weight.

Graphene nanoribbons offer a potential solution because they can act as both a conductor (instead of copper) and semiconductor (instead of silicon). Moreover, their ability to withstand failure under extreme energy loads is roughly 1,000 times greater than copper.

That bodes well for the Navy, which, like segments of the automotive industry, is pivoting toward electric vehicles.

It recently launched an all-electric destroyer; the ship’s propellers and drive shafts are turned by electric motors, as opposed to being connected to combustion engines. The integrated power-generation and distribution system may also be used to fire next generation weapons, such as railguns and powerful lasers. And the automation has allowed the Navy to reduce the ship’s crew, which places fewer sailors in potentially dangerous situations.

Graphene nanoribbons could improve these systems by making them more robust and energy-efficient, Basaran said. He and a team of researchers will:

·         Design complex simulations that examine how graphene nanoribbons can be used as a power switch.

·         Explore how adding hydrogen and other elements, a process known as “doping,” to graphene nanoribbons could improve their performance.

·         Investigate graphene nanoribbons’ failure limit under high power loads and try to find ways to improve it.

The research will be performed over the next four years.

I was particularly intrigued by the caption for this image included with the news release,

The technology may lead to more powerful weapons, energy savings and reduced crew numbers [Downloaded from http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2015/07/021.html]

The technology may lead to more powerful weapons, energy savings and reduced crew numbers [Downloaded from http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2015/07/021.html]

Presumably “reduced crew numbers’ means fewer jobs. I wonder if they’ll figure out that people without jobs are without money to pay taxes to fund these projects.

Darwin’s barnacles become unglued

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The world’s strongest glue comes from barnacles and those creatures have something to teach us. From a July 18, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

Over a 150 years since it was first described by Darwin, scientists are finally uncovering the secrets behind the super strength of barnacle glue.

Still far better than anything we have been able to develop synthetically, barnacle glue – or cement – sticks to any surface, under any conditions.

But exactly how this superglue of superglues works has remained a mystery – until now.

An international team of scientists led by Newcastle University, UK, and funded by the US Office of Naval Research, have shown for the first time that barnacle larvae release an oily droplet to clear the water from surfaces before sticking down using a phosphoprotein adhesive.

A July 18, 2014 Newcastle University (UK) press release, which originated the news item, provides some context and describes the research,

“It’s over 150 years since Darwin first described the cement glands of barnacle larvae and little work has been done since then,” says Dr Aldred, a research associate in the School of Marine Science and Technology at Newcastle University, one of the world’s leading institutions in this field of research.

“We’ve known for a while there are two components to the bioadhesive but until now, it was thought they behaved a bit like some of the synthetic glues – mixing before hardening.  But that still left the question, how does the glue contact the surface in the first place if it is already covered with water?  This is one of the key hurdles to developing glues for underwater applications.

“Advances in imaging techniques, such as 2-photon microscopy, have allowed us to observe the adhesion process and characterise the two components. We now know that these two substances play very different roles – one clearing water from the surface and the other cementing the barnacle down.

“The ocean is a complex mixture of dissolved ions, the pH varies significantly across geographical areas and, obviously, it’s wet.  Yet despite these hostile conditions, barnacle glue is able to withstand the test of time.

“It’s an incredibly clever natural solution to this problem of how to deal with a water barrier on a surface it will change the way we think about developing bio-inspired adhesives that are safe and already optimised to work in conditions similar to those in the human body, as well as marine paints that stop barnacles from sticking.”

Barnacles have two larval stages – the nauplius and the cyprid.  The nauplius, is common to most crustacea and it swims freely once it hatches out of the egg, feeding in the plankton.

The final larval stage, however, is the cyprid, which is unique to barnacles.  It investigates surfaces, selecting one that provides suitable conditions for growth. Once it has decided to attach permanently, the cyprid releases its glue and cements itself to the surface where it will live out the rest of its days.

“The key here is the technology.  With these new tools we are able to study processes in living tissues, as they happen. We can get compositional and molecular information by other methods, but they don’t explain the mechanism.  There’s no substitute for seeing things with your own eyes. ” explains Dr Aldred.

“In the past, the strong lasers used for optically sectioning biological samples have typically killed the samples, but now technology allows us to study life processes exactly as they would happen in nature.”

The press release also notes some possible applications for these research findings (Note: Links have been removed),

Publishing their findings this week in the prestigious academic journal Nature Communications, author Dr Nick Aldred says the findings could pave the way for the development of novel synthetic bioadhesives for use in medical implants and micro-electronics.  The research will also be important in the production of new anti-fouling coatings for ships.

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

Synergistic roles for lipids and proteins in the permanent adhesive of barnacle larvae by Neeraj V. Gohad, Nick Aldred, Christopher M. Hartshorn, Young Jong Lee, Marcus T. Cicerone, Beatriz Orihuela, Anthony S. Clare, Dan Rittschof, & Andrew S. Mount. Nature Communications 5, Article number: 4414 doi:10.1038/ncomms5414 Published 11 July 2014

This paper is behind a paywall although a free preview is available via ReadCube Access.

Robotic sea jellies (jellyfish) and carbon nanotubes

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After my recent experience at the Vancouver Aquarium (Jan.19.12 posting) where I was informed that jellyfish are now called sea jellies, I was not expecting to see the term jellyfish still in use. I gather the new name is not being used universally yet, which explains the title for a March 23, 2012 news item on Nanowerk, Robotic jellyfish built on nanotechnology,

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas and Virginia Tech have created an undersea vehicle inspired by the common jellyfish that runs on renewable energy and could be used in ocean rescue and surveillance missions.

In a study published this week in Smart Materials and Structures (“Hydrogen-fuel-powered bell segments of biomimetic jellyfish”), scientists created a robotic jellyfish, dubbed Robojelly, that feeds off hydrogen and oxygen gases found in water.

“We’ve created an underwater robot that doesn’t need batteries or electricity,” said Dr. Yonas Tadesse, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UT Dallas and lead author of the study. “The only waste released as it travels is more water.”

Engineers and scientists have increasingly turned to nature for inspiration when creating new technologies. The simple yet powerful movement of the moon jellyfish made it an appealing animal to simulate.

The March 22, 2012 press release from the University of Texas at Dallas features images and a video in addition to its text. From the press release,

The Robojelly consists of two bell-like structures made of silicone that fold like an umbrella. Connecting the umbrella are muscles that contract to move.

Here’s a computer-aided image,

A computer-aided model of Robojelly shows the vehicle's two bell-like structures.

Here’s what the robojelly looks like,

The Robojelly, shown here out of water, has an outer structure made out of silicone.

This robojelly differs from the original model,which was battery-powered. Here’s a video of the original robojelly,

The new robojelly has artificial muscles(from the Mar. 22, 2012 University of Texas at Dallas press release),

In this study, researchers upgraded the original, battery-powered Robojelly to be self-powered. They did that through a combination of high-tech materials, including artificial muscles that contract when heated.

These muscles are made of a nickel-titanium alloy wrapped in carbon nanotubes, coated with platinum and housed in a pipe. As the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen encounters the platinum, heat and water vapor are created. That heat causes a contraction that moves the muscles of the device, pumping out the water and starting the cycle again.

“It could stay underwater and refuel itself while it is performing surveillance,” Tadesse said.

In addition to military surveillance, Tadesse said, the device could be used to detect pollutants in water.

This is a study that has been funded by the US Office of Naval Research. At the next stage, researchers want to make the robojelly’s legs work independently so it can travel in more than one direction.