Researchers Laura Rossi and her group at TU Delft and her colleagues from Queen's University and the University of Amsterdam,have found a new way to build synthetic materials out of tiny glass particles -- so-called colloids.

Figure 1: Building synthetic materials from glass particles.

Figure 1 shows that Colloids are tiny particles, a few nanometers to a few microns in size. They consist of a collection of molecules and can have different properties depending on the material they are made of.

"Under certain circumstances colloids can behave like atoms and molecules, but their interactions are less strong," Rossi explains.

The cube-shaped colloids from this study, which are made from glass, will assemble themselves into simple structures like distorted cubic and hexagonal lattices. But instead of going immediately from the building block to the final structure, the researchers took small groups of colloids and combined them into bigger building blocks.

When they assembled these clusters of colloids, they ended up with a different final structure with different material properties than the self-assembled structure. [1]

According to Rossi and her collaborator Greg van Anders, one of the ultimate goals of their research community is to design complex colloidal structures on demand. “What we found here is very important, because for possible applications, we need to have procedures that can be scaled up which is something that will be hard to achieve with most currently available approaches.”

Rossi explains, “We found that the density of the structure that we prepared was much lower than the density of the structure you would obtain by using the starting building blocks. So, you can think about strong but lightweight materials for transportation.” [2]

After Rossi's team-built clusters of colloids in the lab, "With these kinds of projects, it's great to be able to team up with others who can run simulations, not only to understand what's happening in depth, but also to test how big the chance of a successful lab experiment will be," Rossi explains.

The next step will be to actually build the final structure made from the groups of colloids in the lab. "After seeing these results, I'm confident that it can be done," says Rossi. "It would be great to have a physical version of this material and hold it in my hand."

References:

1. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220527142114.htm
2. https://scitechdaily.com/a-new-way-to-build-synthetic-materials-out-of-tiny-particles/
3. source: https://phys.org/news/2022-05-route-materials-tiny-particles.html

Cite this article:

Sri Vasagi K (2022), Researcher Found a Way to Create Synthetic Materials Using Glass Particles, Anatechmaz, pp. 346