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Thursday, 24th September 2009 (3774 views)

Gold has been used by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in a key experiment measuring how nanoscale patterns on the surface of material can affect the way it interacts with liquids.

Interfacial energy, or "wetting", refers to the likelihood of a liquid to spread evenly over a surface or bead up, Nanowerk reports.

Different surfaces have different wetting characteristics - rainwater beads up on a car windscreen, whereas oil spread evenly on glass.

A team led by associate professor Francesco Stellacci found that when a gold surface is coated with patterns alternating water-attracting and water-repelling compounds, the scale of these patterns can substantially affect the wetting characteristics of the material.

"What we found is that the way water or a solvent wets the surface also depends on the structure of the surface," Professor Sellacci said - a fundamentally new discovery.

The findings could have wide-ranging implications, he added, affecting everything from how a drug penetrates tissue to how coatings adhere to surfaces. It could also help to produce faster catalytic reactions in fuel cells.

Earlier this week, MIT professor Angela Belcher told CNN that gold could also be used to coat specially-engineered viruses in self-assembling batteries.

 

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