Category Archives: MyResearch

Slow moving nanoparticles

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Random track of a nanoparticle superimposed on its image generated in the microscope using a pin-hole and narrowband filter.

A couple of weeks ago I bragged about research from my group being included in a press release from the Royal Society [see post entitled ‘Press Release!‘ on November 15th, 2017].  I hate to be boring but it’s happened again.  Some research that we have been performing with the European Union’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra [see my post entitled ‘Toxic nanoparticles‘ on November 13th, 2013] has been published this morning by the Royal Society Open Science.

Our experimental measurements of the free motion of small nanoparticles in a fluid have shown that they move slower than expected.  At low concentrations, unexpectedly large groups of molecules in the form of nanoparticles up to 150-300nm in diameter behave more like an individual molecule than a particle.  Our experiments support predictions from computer simulations by other researchers, which suggest that at low concentrations the motion of small nanoparticles in a fluid might be dominated by van der Waals forces rather the thermal motion of the surrounding molecules.  At the nanoscale there is still much that we do not understand and so these findings will have potential implications for predicting nanoparticle transport, for instance in drug delivery [e.g., via the nasal passage to the central nervous system], and for understanding enhanced heat transfer in nanofluids, which is important in designing systems such as cooling for electronics, solar collectors and nuclear reactors.

Our article’s title is ‘Transition from fractional to classical Stokes-Einstein behaviour in simple fluids‘ which does not reveal much unless you are familiar with the behaviour of particles and molecules.  So, here’s a quick explanation: Robert Brown gave his name to the motion of particles suspended in a fluid after reporting the random motion or diffusion of pollen particles in water in 1828.  In 1906, Einstein postulated that the motion of a suspended particle is generated by the thermal motion of the surrounding fluid molecules.  While Stokes law relates the drag force on the particle to its size and fluid viscosity.  Hence, the Brownian motion of a particle can be described by the combined Stokes-Einstein relationship.  However, at the molecular scale, the motion of individual molecules in a fluid is dominated by van der Waals forces, which results in the size of the molecule being unimportant and the diffusion of the molecule being inversely proportional to a fractional power of the fluid viscosity; hence the term fractional Stokes-Einstein behaviour.  Nanoparticles that approach the size of large molecules are not visible in an optical microscope and so we have tracked them using a special technique based on imaging their shadow [see my post ‘Seeing the invisible‘ on October 29th, 2014].

Source:

Coglitore D, Edwardson SP, Macko P, Patterson EA, Whelan MP, Transition from fractional to classical Stokes-Einstein behaviour in simple fluids, Royal Society Open Science, 4:170507, 2017. doi: 10.1098/rsos.170507

Press release!

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A jumbo jet has about six million parts of which roughly half are fasteners – that’s a lot of holes.

It is very rare for one of my research papers to be included in a press release on its publication.  But that’s what has happened this month as a consequence of a paper being included in the latest series published by the Royal Society.  The contents of the paper are not earth shattering in terms of their consequences for humanity; however, we have resolved a long-standing controversy about why cracks grow from small holes in structures [see post entitled ‘Alan Arnold Griffith‘ on  April 26th, 2017] that are meant to be protected from such events by beneficial residual stresses around the hole.  This is important for aircraft structures since a civilian airliner can have millions of holes that contain rivets and bolts which hold the structure together.

We have used mechanical tests to assess fatigue life, thermoelastic stress analysis to measure stress distributions [see post entitled ‘Counting photons to measure stress‘ on November 18th, 2015], synchrotron x-ray diffraction to evaluate residual stress inside the metal and microscopy to examine failure surfaces [see post entitled ‘Forensic engineering‘ on July 22nd, 2015].  The data from this diverse set of experiments is integrated in the paper to provide a mechanistic explanation of how cracks exploit imperfections in the beneficial residual stress field introduced by the manufacturing process and can be aided in their growth by occasional but modest overloads, which might occur during a difficult landing or take-off.

The success of this research is particularly satisfying because at its heart is a PhD student supported by a dual PhD programme between the University of Liverpool and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.  This programme, which supported by the two partner universities, is in its sixth year of operation with a steady state of about two dozen PhD students enrolled, who divide their time between Liverpool, England and Hsinchu, Taiwan.  The synchrotron diffraction measurements were performed, with a colleague from Sheffield Hallam University, at the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France; thus making this a truly international collaboration.

Source:

Amjad K, Asquith D, Patterson EA, Sebastian CM & Wang WC, The interaction of fatigue cracks with a residual stress field using thermoelastic stress analysis and synchrotron x-ray diffraction experiments, R. Soc. Open Sci. 4:171100.

Red to blue

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Some research has a very long incubation time.  Last month, we published a short paper that describes the initial results of research that started just after I arrived in Liverpool in 2011.  There are various reasons for our slow progress, including our caution about the validity of the original idea and the challenges of working across discipline boundaries.  However, we were induced to rush to publication by the realization that others were catching up with us [see blog post and conference paper].  Our title does not give much away: ‘Characterisation of metal fatigue by optical second harmonic generation‘.

Second harmonic generation or frequency doubling occurs when photons interact with a non-linear material and are combined to produce new photons with twice the energy, and hence, twice the frequency and half the wavelength of the original photons.  Photons are discrete packets of energy that, in our case, are supplied in pulses of 2 picoseconds from a laser operating at a wavelength of 800 nanometres (nm).  The photons strike the surface, are reflected, and then collected in a spectrograph to allow us to evaluate the wavelength of the reflected photons.  We look for ones at 400 nm, i.e. a shift from red to blue.

The key finding of our research is that the second harmonic generation from material in the plastic zone ahead of a propagating fatigue crack is different to virgin material that has experienced no plastic deformation.  This is significant because the shape and size of the crack tip plastic zone determines the rate and direction of crack propagation; so, information about the plastic zone can be used to predict the life of a component.  At first sight, this capability appears similar to thermoelastic stress analysis that I have described in Instructive Update on October 4th, 2017; however, the significant potential advantage of second harmonic generation is that the component does not have to be subject to a cyclic load during the measurement, which implies we could study behaviour during a load cycle as well as conduct forensic investigations.  We have some work to do to realise this potential including developing an instrument for routine measurements in an engineering laboratory, rather than an optics lab.

Last week, I promised weekly links to posts on relevant Thermodynamics topics for students following my undergraduate module; so here are three: ‘Emergent properties‘, ‘Problem-solving in Thermodynamics‘, and ‘Running away from tigers‘.

 

Instructive Update

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Six months ago I wrote about our EU research project, called INSTRUCTIVE, and the likely consequences of Brexit for research [see my post: ‘Instructive report and Brexit‘ on March 29th, 2017].  We seem to be no closer to knowing the repercussions of Brexit on research in the UK and EU – a quarter of EU funding allocated to universities goes to UK universities so the potential impacts will hit both the UK and EU.  Some researchers take every opportunity to highlight these risks and the economic benefits of EU research; for instance the previous EU research programme, Framework Programme 7, is estimated to have created 900,000 jobs in Europe and increased GDP by about 1% in perpetuity.  However, most researchers are quietly getting on with their research and hoping that our political leaders will eventually arrive at a solution that safeguards our prosperity and security.  Our INSTRUCTIVE team is no exception to this approach.  We are about half-way through our project and delivered our first public presentation of our work at the International Conference on Advances in Experimental Mechanics last month.  We described how we are able to identify cracks in metallic structures before they are long enough to be visible to the naked eye, or any other inspection technique commonly used for aircraft structures.  We identify the cracks using an infra-red camera by detecting the energy released during the formation and accumulation of dislocations in the atomic structure that coalesce into voids and eventually into cracks [see my post entitled ‘Alan Arnold Griffith‘ on April 26th, 2017 for more on energy release during crack formation].  We can identify cracks at sub-millimetre lengths and then track them as they propagate through a structure.  At the moment, we are quantifying our ability to detect cracks forming underneath the heads of fasteners [see picture] and other features in real aerospace structures; so that we can move our technology out of the laboratory and into an industrial environment.  We have a big chunk of airplane sitting in the laboratory that we will use for future tests – more on that in later blog posts!

INSTRUCTIVE is an EU Horizon 2020 project funded under the Clean Sky 2 programme [project no. 686777] and involves Strain Solutions Ltd and the University of Liverpool working with Airbus.

Statistics on funding from http://russellgroup.ac.uk/news/horizon-2020-latest-statistics/and https://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/media/5068/24horizon-2020-the-contribution-of-russell-group-universities-june-201.pdf

For other posts on similar research topics, see ‘Counting photons to measure stress‘ on November 18th, 2015 and ‘Forensic engineering‘ on July 22nd, 2015.