Scientists Create Strange Material That Can Both Move and Block Heat:
All activity generates heat, because energy escapes from everything we do. But too much can wear out batteries and electronic components—like parts in an aging laptop that runs too hot to actually sit on your lap. If you can't get rid of heat, you've got a problem.
Scientists at the University of Chicago have invented a new way to funnel heat around at the microscopic level: a thermal insulator made using an innovative technique. They stack ultra-thin layers of crystalline sheets on top of each other, but rotate each layer slightly, creating a material with atoms that are aligned in one direction but not in the other.
"Think of a partly-finished Rubik's cube, with layers all rotated in random directions," said Shi En Kim, a graduate student with the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering who is the first author of the study. "What that means is that within each layer of the crystal, we still have an ordered lattice of atoms, but if you move to the neighboring layer, you have no idea where the next atoms will be relative to the previous layer—the atoms are completely messy along this direction."
The result is a material that is extremely good at both containing heat and moving it, albeit in different directions—an unusual ability at the microscale, and one that could have very useful applications in electronics and other technology.
"The combination of excellent heat conductivity in one direction and excellent insulation in the other direction does not exist at all in nature," said study lead author Jiwoong Park, professor of chemistry and molecular engineering at the University of Chicago. "We hope this could open up an entirely new direction for making novel materials."
Journal Reference:
Kim, Shi En, Mujid, Fauzia, Rai, Akash, et al. Extremely anisotropic van der Waals thermal conductors [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03867-8)
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 08 2021, @01:42AM
That some crazy shit, man. Some whacked-out anisotropic shit. But then all them anisotropic shits are cray cray.
Damn scientist weirdoes - keep them away from your children.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday October 08 2021, @02:34AM (5 children)
Does not exist at all in nature?
Color me unconvinced, but they've *just* discovered that a new form of material with counterintuitive thermal properties is possible, and have already done a comprehensive survey of all life on Earth to determine that nothing is already growing something similar?
Maybe it really is weird and specialized enough that nothing evolved similar properties. But it seems at least as likely that we've just never noticed such properties - how many biologists carefully test the directional thermal conduction of scales, exoskeletons, shells, etc.? It's not really something we suspected was possible, and unlike the "magical" gripping power of gecko feet, it's not at all an obvious property if you're not specifically looking for it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 08 2021, @04:50AM (2 children)
A material like this tends to have poor shear strength along the misaligned plane, which makes it undesirable for structural elements like exoskeletons and shells. While I won't say that it is impossible, I find it highly unlikely that fine directional thermal control like this could have a useful biological purpose.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 08 2021, @01:41PM (1 child)
It could have useful biological properties, but probably not at the mass scale. Think of it as an layer of insulation. Of course, you'd need to marry it with a heat pump here and there along the surface. So it could be used to keep one either warmer or cooler. But you'd probably be looking at thin layers, that could easily escape notice by someone who wasn't looking for them.
So I wouldn't be sure it didn't occur in nature, though it does seem rather unlikely. Feathers work just about as well for most purposes, and developing that material would seem to require several steps whose utility prior to the final state isn't obvious. (You might want to examine the heat sensing organ of pit vipers, though.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 08 2021, @09:21PM
Nature has several existing insulation materials. What makes this material special is directionality at microscopic scales, which doesn't have any obvious biological purpose. It also only happens because of an unusual crystal structure, which should be noticed because it implies unusual mechanical properties as well.
Reptilian directional heat sensing is entirely due to using a concave surface, not because of any insulating property.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 08 2021, @08:21PM (1 child)
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01710 [nature.com]
Published: 23 April 2013
Anisotropic Thermal and Electrical Properties of Thin Thermal Interface Layers of Graphite Nanoplatelet-Based Composites
I'm sure you can find a lot of graphite in nature.
And if you look hard enough I suspect you'd be able to find some double-walled carbon nanotubes in soot in nature.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317355050_Extremely_high_thermal_conductivity_anisotropy_of_double-walled_carbon_nanotubes [researchgate.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 09 2021, @06:07PM
IIRC graphite sheets normally self align as they form. This experiment required forced misalignment.
(Score: 2) by oumuamua on Friday October 08 2021, @05:02PM (1 child)
This indeed looks like an actual Maxwell's Demon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon [wikipedia.org]
stick this between two tanks of water and watch one side become cooler and one become warmer, then harvest the temperature difference for basically free energy.
That violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, something must be off.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 08 2021, @09:27PM
Your interpretation is what is off. This material conducts differently along different axis, not differently along the same axis like Maxwell's Demon.
(Score: 2) by Username on Saturday October 09 2021, @05:28PM
Air Duster in fan. Just remember to lock the fan up so it doesn't spin.