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Adam Clancy Researchers from University College London created a mixture of flour and formic acid, a common food preservative. They used electrical force to force this mixture into a hollow needle, releasing nanofibers just 372 nanometers in diameter. This is too small to be seen with the naked eye.
Such fine fibers have previously been made from starch extracted from plants, but Clancy says the process is harmful to the environment. “You just soak it in a corrosive substance, dissolve it in water, wash it off, and throw it in the river,” he says.
Individual strands can be spun into pasta nets.
Beatrice Britton/Adam Clancy
But with flour mixtures nothing like that happens. Simply grind the grain to make flour and mix it with formic acid, he says.
The resulting “nanopasta” is rotated to form small mats approximately 2 centimeters in diameter. Clancy says it's safe to eat, although it’s not intended to be used as food. However, some people might expect it to be more chewy than expected.
Clancy says using dried potatoes, which have more starch and lower fiber content than flour mixtures, could make a variety of other natural raw materials even more useful, and could potentially produce even better nanofibers. That’s what I think.
You can weave such materials. bandage It allows air and moisture to pass through freely, but keeps germs out, Clancy says. Nanofibers are also used as scaffolds for tissue regrowth and are being investigated for use in filtration and filtration systems. battery.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
