Shape Shifting Crystals Turn Evaporation into Energy and Offer Artificial Muscles for Many Applications
A tripeptide crystal with aqueous pores can reversibly deform in response to humidity changes.
Image courtesy: Tong Wang
“When evaporation causes water to be removed from the pores, this results in a forceful deformation of the entire crystal through a network-like connection. The resulting shape-change is reversed when water vapor is reintroduced,” said Chen, the corresponding author of the research and an assistant professor, chemical engineering, in CCNY’s Grove School of Engineering. “Our peptide crystals allow the direct observation of water-material interactions at the molecular level by using existing crystallographic, spectroscopic and computational methods. The revealed actuation mechanisms are applicable more generally for the deigns of materials or structures that efficiently harness evaporation.”
Materials that drive these motions are known as water-responsive or humidity-responsive materials. These materials, that swell and contract in response to changes in humidity, could directly and efficiently convert energy from evaporation into mechanical motions. This new field opens up possibilities for accessing untapped water evaporation as a source of energy as well as developing better actuators and artificial muscles for modern engineering systems.
The research was co-led by Rein V. Ulijn of Hunter College and the Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY; and Tell Tuttle of University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Researchers from CUNY, University of Strathclyde, and New York University were also involved in the research.
Support was provided by the Office of Naval Research through the Biomaterials and Bionanotechnology program, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Contacts and sources:
Jay Mwamba
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2020/09/blog-post_6.html
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Perhaps a little off topic, but what if space-time is crystalline in structure? Though all the virtual quantum activity appears and perhaps necessitates randomness, that activity over an interval may exhibit a repeatable pattern. Physical phenomenon may then break that crystalline structure, and maybe start new crystalline structures radiating in all directions including forward and backward in time. Maybe there are applications in manipulating the crystalline structure of space-time for teleportation and deep space travel. The crystalline structure may change with distance allowing local manipulation to connect to distant points. Or on the flipside, if space-time is not crystalline, what would happen if you could somehow induce crystallization?