NEW GLASSY MATERIALS
In the follow-up paper, de Pablo and coauthors show how the vapor-deposition process can create new glassy mateials by manipulating their molecular orientation.
Using vapor deposition, coauthor University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mark Ediger and his team create glasses in a vacuum chamber by heating a sample material, which vaporizes, condenses, and grows atop an experimental surface.
In their latest work, the researchers compared three data sets with each other: the simplified computer model of their earlier paper; a new, much more sophisticated computer model; and the experimental results.
The similarities between the data sets are striking, notes Ivan Lyubimov, lead author of the follow-up study and a postdoctoral research associate in molecular engineering at Chicago. The experimental results require some interpretation of the molecular configuration because of inherent limitations of optical measurement techniques.
But in the atomic-scale simulations rendered by the university’s Midway Computing Cluster, “we can exactly specify the molecular configuration,” Lyubimov says. “The area of uncertainty now is whether the model is accurate or not. Running these two models allows us to improve the certainty that this mechanism which we found is probably real.”
The researchers’ latest results confirmed their earlier findings.
“The result is here,” de Pablo says. “We have been able to generate new glasses with new and unknown properties through this combination of experiment, theory, and computation.”
CHEAPER DISCOVERY OF NEW MATERIALS
Pursuing development of new materials through laboratory experiments alone would be more time-consuming and costly, de Pablo says.
“By adding this element of theory, we can actually answer some questions a lot sooner, understand why things happened, and now start designing and engineering materials from first principles because we have a better understanding of how the process works.”
While still at Wisconsin, de Pablo and his colleagues conducted experiments to fully document the properties of some of the molecules that tardigrades and other organisms, including some plants, use to develop their protective, glassy cocoons.
This work led to a patented method—with applications in the pharmaceutical and food industries—for stabilizing proteins in bacteria or cells for long periods of time without refrigeration.
“One of the companies that has licensed the patent makes cell cultures for yogurt and makes a lot of it,” de Pablo says.
Funding from the Materials Genome Initiative, which President Obama launched in 2011, helped support the work.
Republished as a derivative work from Futurity.org under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article published on Futurity by Steve Koppes-Chicago.
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