Unboil an egg’ machine could revolutionise electronics, drugs

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-12/new-use-found-for-unboil-an-egg-machine/7241532

The title was submitted before edited unintentionally

A machine that can “unboil” an egg by unravelling its proteins can also cut through incredibly strong carbon nanotubes, creating huge potential for new electronics and drugs.

Key points:

Vortex fluidic device can cut super strong carbon nanotubes
The small machine uses water, a solvent and lasers
Potential uses include cancer drugs and solar panels
Professor Colin Raston from Adelaide’s Flinders University invented the vortex fluidic device (VFD) after a eureka moment on a trans-Pacific flight.

Carbon nanotubes were considered revolutionary when developed 40 years ago, but their potential stalled because they were hard to work with.

Professor Raston figured out that the egg unboiler can also

slice carbon nanotubes into precise length, when combined with water, a solvent and lasers.

Carbon nanotubes are 200 times stronger than steel, and conduct electricity five times better than copper.

“ like a bit of spaghetti so it’s got to be coiled up properly. If it’s not they stick together and they stick to everything so they’re very difficult to purify,” Professor Raston said.

To cut carbon nanotubes, scientists normally have to use complex oxidation procedures and dangerous chemicals, which produce random-sized pieces.

But the VFD can cut them to an average length of 170 nanometres, making them far easier to deploy in medicine and electronics.

The development of the VFD last year earned Professor Raston a famed Ig Nobel prize.

Potentially game-changing applications

Professor Raston said it was a “contradiction” that the super-strong carbon nanotubes could be modified so simply.

“To take an exceptionally strong material and yet be able to cut it in a liquid without heating – that’s what the VFD can do,” he said.

vortex fluidic device PHOTO: Professor Colin Raston’s vortex fluidic device. (ABC News) Professor Raston said the process took only minutes and it had a wide range of potential applications.

“They range from chemistry to physics, possibly to mineral processing, food processing, biochemistry, medicine and if you think about it there’s 10,000 universities in the world so there is a market for just selling it as a research tool,” he said.

“We have our tablets and we have our iPhones and they’re full of heavy metals, they’re full of some metals that are probably rapidly approaching supply chain issues, they’re being used up.

“So why not redevelop technologies based on carbon?”

PhD student Kasturi Vimalanathan played a key role in developing the VFD’s internal cutting process.

“We are now investigating the wide range of commercial possibilities for the precision-cut nanotubes,” she said.

Ms Vimalanathan said they could be used in solar panels, targeted cancer drugs or advanced electronics.

Flinders University collaborated with Curtin University, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, and the universities of Cincinatti and Missouri-Columbia in the United States.

monkey skipper said:

A machine that can “unboil” an egg by unravelling its proteins can also cut through incredibly strong carbon nanotubes, creating huge potential for new electronics and drugs.

Slightly off topic, but that gives me a different idea, a machine that “uncuts” carbon nanotubes.

Carbon nanotubes are practically useless now because they’re too short, of the order of a few mm. Longer nanotubes have been made, but have poor quality (according to a CSIRO nanotube researcher).

So let’s make a machine that “uncuts” carbon nanotubes. It works like this. When nanotubes are made, the ends are naturally electrically charged, so they automatically line up into a long string that can be many metres long. This happens automatically – let’s call it a nanotube “thread”. Place a nanotube thread in a container filled with methane and a slight excess of hydrogen. Apply a very high and exactly controllable voltage to the ends of the thread. Because of the high electrical resistance of the junctions between nanotubes they will heat up to the point where the adjacent methane decomposes, depositing carbon atoms at the hot junction to weld the nanotubes together. Control the voltage so that the local maximum temperature on the thread remains in the optimal range. As each junction is welded shut its conductivity will increase, automatically shifting the welding operation to another junction, and so on until all the nanotubes of the thread are welded together into a super-strong highly-conducting giant nanotube.

(Then build a space elevator from it.)

monkey skipper said:

Unboil an egg’ machine could revolutionise electronics, drugs

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-12/new-use-found-for-unboil-an-egg-machine/7241532

A machine that can “unboil” an egg by unravelling its proteins. Vortex fluidic device
Professor Colin Raston from Adelaide’s Flinders University invented the vortex fluidic device (VFD)

Trying to work out how it “unboils” and egg. I think I have it. Note that an egg does not have “sub-millilitre volume”. Also, they don’t say what the shear rate is!
Optimising a vortex fluidic device for controlling chemical reactivity and selectivity

“Herein we report the details of a low cost vortex fluidic device (VFD) which has a rapidly rotating tube open at one end, where at high rotational speed, intense shear is generated in the resulting thin films for finite sub-millilitre volumes of liquid, depending on the speed and orientation of the tube, and other operating parameters. This is the ‘confined mode’ of operation of the VFD. It can also operate under the ‘continuous flow mode’ with jet feeds delivering liquid into the rotating tube where additional shear is generated in the thin films from the viscous drag as the liquid whirls along the tube. The prototype of the VFD presented herein operates with a 10 mm diameter tube, for speeds up to 10,000 rpm”