Mechanochemistry involves broken and grinding powders together
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Imagine yourself in a chemistry laboratory. You probably imagine a scene with a full load of liquids – bubbling fluids in round -bottom bottles, swirling solutions in test tubes, droplets that flow the condensers. It is a snapshot, but which describes with precision what these spaces have been like for centuries worldwide.
There is not a lot of foam or bubbling in progress Tomislav FriščićThe laboratory, however. This is because he and his team at the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, try to suppress liquid chemistry. The tools of their profession are powerful machines like the ball mill, a crusher full of metal spheres that looks like a mini cement mixer. It may seem brutal, but this hard ball approach could shake the work of chemists, releasing them from “mental prison”, as Friščić says, to have to dissolve everything.
Chemistry creates many wonders of modern life, drugs that heal us to the screens with which we communicate. When researchers want to do these things from scratch, they often start by supposing that they have to dissolve their materials. But the mechanimal, the friščić booming field is fascinated, shows that it is not always necessary. “Mechanochemistry gives you the intellectual freedom to think:” Allow me to try this reaction by crushing it “,” explains Friščić. “And, in many cases, it works.”
