From the New World: A Sugar Planet Created by Ultrasound

You, Sizhu

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/75905 Copy

Description

Title

From the New World: A Sugar Planet Created by Ultrasound

Author(s)

You, Sizhu

Contributor(s)

• Cheng, Ming-Wei
• Suslick, Kenneth
• Dlott, Dana

Issue Date

2015-04

Keyword(s)

Chemistry

Abstract

When a material is under mechanical impact, the mechanical energy can be spatially and temporally concentrated in certain microstructures inside the material to produce intense thermal hot spots. For more than a century, people have speculated that such hot spots are the cause of some dramatic mechanochemical effects, such as the mechanical initiation of explosions and triboelectricity. Despite being fascinating creatures, hot spots are usually so transient and destructive that they are rarely observed, and never successfully controlled. My research uses ultrasound as mild mechanical stimuli to trigger hot spots with controllable locations and intensities in solid materials. With structural modifications, ultrasound energy spontaneously focuses at designated material interfaces, which produces localized microscale flash heating at a rate reaching 20,000 kelvin per second. This art work is a false-colored scanning electron micrograph showing the morphology of a sucrose crystal after an ultrasonic hot spot flash heated its surface. Crystal melting carved out curvature, land and ocean, while fast gas extrusion from sugar caramelization created the extraterrestrial mountain terrains and forests. Microscale mechanochemistry gave birth to this blessed sugar planet, where people are truly called sweeties.

Type of Resource

• text
• image

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/75905

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2015 Sizhu You

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