Nanomaterials and specially kind of soft type of an element to earth so I thought first to see you know

how small are we going, so ihave this 5p coin a 5 pence coin and I doing a little experiment whit it just to
see u know how small can we go so like take this 5 pence coin put it on the side like this and then try to
slice it in 18900 separate slices one of those slices will have a thinkness of a hundred nanometer and
that hundred nanometer is roughly the definition of a nano type of material so why is this important
well for example the EU regulation this summer will say that in all cosmetics product you have to
basically mention the word nano so if you go to a shop and you look into this formulation kind of things
look at the backpack then it will say hey there might be a nano product in there so what can we do with
this type of nanomaterial and what does actually mean that if we buy product could it begood for us
could it be bad for us so I would like to take you to planed colloid in away clloidal think matter are very
tiny little particle that can be extreamly useful but also happen in the natural world so for example latex
tree the tiny little milky substance that you tap off that tree consists of tiny little plastic balls that are
made of polyisoprene and that base for a rubber like material man-made materials on the nano scale
are also already known since the Egyptians for example they used to dye their hair and end up with left
selenide quantum dots in their hair fibers to blacken their hair a little bit more so here on this picture I
have just shown you 4 types of materials of what we can make nowadays in the lab so on the top left
you’ll see tiny little cubes that are made out of glass and they are hollow and with those hollow
materials we can change optical type of properties so for example we can paint look whiter on the right
hand side at the top you see a material it has got finding squishy hairs in the middle and two kind of
hydra be kind of blob sticking out and these things can self assembly in all kinds of intricate structures or
the bottom left you see it looks like a bit of ping-pong balls but these ping-pong balls are 200n hundred
nanomaterial in diameter and they chris the lines in thie beautifull larger what is called a colloidal
structure these structures are used as structural colors for example the natural analog would be the
color of butterfly wing and on the right hand side at the bottom you see actually a biological plant spore
that is about 30 micfrons in diameter the structure in it self already is very complex but on top of the
edges of this structure we can add tiny particles to alter it is properties so that it can either wet or not
wet the surface it is lanthum so I want you basically going through a bunch of experiments really and I
have sketched them out what we are going to do so here are three scenario

1. We will take a permeable plastic back in a way made out of a very small bblock copolymer and
we are going to decorate it with even smaller particles on the out side the reason why we want
to do this is that this membrane is permeable and we what like to control the release drakes of
matter that is enclosed in it the second options is oil droplets in water all everybody knows if
you do the washing up at home if you have one oil droplets and it bumps into another one day
fuse togetrher so how can we prevent all droplets from fusing to each other we can to that if
decorate it with small inorganic matter with hard particles in a way that act like and armor so
that when these oil droplets now bump into each other they bounce off each other rather then
fusing into one and the third little experiment would be we take three deferent types of
particles one very soft and squishy one that is conducting so conducting carbon black for
example and a tiny tiny little silica glass bead all those three together we freeze into ice and
then we will end up hopefully with it well a nice structures thst can be used so here the result of
out three experiments are the result of our three experiments on the top left you see a beautiful
structures of hollow permeable membranes that basically can be used to deliver all types of
substance at a very controlled rate and at the bottom is this ice crystal types of material this
material this material that is made out of three tiny little particles can be used as an extremely
sensitive gas sensor and I would like to focus on the material on the top right these are very soft
polymery particles that are wrapped around in tiny nano scale clay and these materials are
extremely useful for example in anti well scratch resistant coating ang in flame retardancy and
for I will show you a little clip and
You see basically yhat we have light a polymer film up and the really bad thing about this is if
plastic starts to burn it drips so for example if you are house would be on fire you do not want
this because it is press the fire very quickly and in about two minutes your entire house will be
burned down if he would use this material now which has this particular nano type of
component in it a same polymer film for one it burns a bit slower and the second more
important reason it that fire goes out quicker but more importantly in does not drip at all so in
this particular case the fire will not be able to spread to surfaces that has not been seven fire yet
an as a result of that you have a few minutes extra to excape a burning building so let us take a
little sidestep on this we know now that we can wrap small particles with even smaller particles
around it so how for example can this be use in food well imagine that you put tiny little
droplets of fruit juice in chocolate is nice and tasty but chocolate can also be quite fattening so if
we can remove a bit of the fat and replace it with fruit juice that could be a good thing so in
order to do that we need to have these juice droplets not bumping in to each other and we
learned already that we can to that with putting in organic material around it and for that we
can use silica which is allowed in food that secondly you might know that water is more heavy
than food so if I have that droplets in molten chocolate they will all fall down for this not to
happen we kind of glue everything together with a type of sellotape of approach and for that we
use a molecule called kite asan so that is like experiment number one the other experiment
what I want to show you is that if you think for example of noodles that are dried out and you
put them in water they will all spread out if you want those noodles not to spread out you might
think of something like Velcro or paddle board and you can basically have every single chain
with some of these things attached to eat and that lose everything nicely together so do those
two concept are extremely useful in making interesting materials so let us look the chocolate
case first so here you see a picture of well what we call in the UK dark chocolate, milk chocolate
and white chocolate and below that you see that you have these tiny droplets of fruit juice that
are less 30 microns in diameter pure perfectly dispersed in the chocolate matrix the col thing
about that is because they are so small you will basically not sense that you will have kind of
these droplets present in the top tube you will teste it still a little bit this material over here is a
beautiful colored polymeric film that normally would disintegrate if you would expose it to a
solvent this material has got these Velcro these pedal port bits in the molecular chains and as a
result of that it stays intact when it is put into a solvent so for that you mix you can make very
thin solvent resistant materials extremely useful so now let us look at what we can do next so
we can play with particle we can make really complex particles but what if we can make these
things really clever and make these things do things by themselves so imagine if it would be
possible that we have like some happy smiley particles that are sketched as the white ones dis
firce they are in a fluidic river and they flow along quite happily and then we have like these red
ones that look a bit more cylindrical and suddenly they realize there is food somewhere else and
decided to swim in an other direction by themselves without us controlling it with an external
joystick for example that would be really cool that effect is called chemotaxis the second things
would be what if we could make a foamy wire that contains tiny little droplets and what if this
foamy wire could move by it self if we trigger it for example by heating up the temperature and
could shrink and deform and release it is content and third what if we would have like plastic
fine plastic bags that spontaneously could open up to release their content well this is the edge
of colloidal science and these type of things start to become possible now so here in this clip if
you focus on these really light little cylindycal bits you can see they go to the dark spot on the
top right whereas the round spheres tend to move to the top left this is like version 1.0 of clever
particles that can do this type of chemotaxis behavior extremely exciting because it basically
means that you can make half man-made small matter swim to a place where you wanted to
swim and then do whatever you want eat to do in the next example you see this wire thisi is this
foamy wired that by heating it up a little bit starts to wiggle about completely by it self and it
shrinks and it releases it is contain and last but not least here you see a picture of these tiny
little kind of plastic membranes there about a hundred microns in diameter and we can now
trigger it is contain by it self so in this particular case you see that gas bubbles gets producet at
the surface and it is content is beautifully released so to wrap up. I have shown you three things
what is possible with colloid nano-based squishy material we can make flame retardant coatings
we can alter your food to make it more healthy and the next level will take us to a complete
unexplored area of soft colloidal science