Recent MIT graduates Samantha McBride PhD ’20 and Henri-Louis Girard PhD ’20, along with professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi, have found a way to use a combination of hydrophobic (water repelling) surfaces as well as heat to crystallize dissolved salts, thus making them easy to remove them from the surface. In some cases, this phenomenon can occur by gravity alone.
The self-ejecting process is based on evaporation from a surface whose texture can be easily produced by etching, abrasion, or coating, and it could be a game changer wide variety of processes. For example, various kinds of metal structures in marine environments are exposed to seawater, causing them to suffer from scaling and corrosion. By simply varying the amount of heat along the surface, the crystal formations can even roll along in a specific direction. In other words, the higher the temperature, the faster the growth and launch these structures take place, reducing the amount of time the crystals block the surface.
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These legs are hollow tubes, and the liquid is funneled down through these tubes. Once it hits the bottom and evaporates, it forms new crystals that continuously increase the length of the tube. In the end, you have very, very limited contact between the substrate and the crystal, to the point where these are going to just roll away on their own,” said Samantha McBride, MIT gradate.
