Finished my phD in History, and now I'm basically a NEET for the time being. How's everyone going? Haven't active;y used this site for a while, and it's cool to see the same familiar faces are still here. So, I'd like to ask everyone: on what subjects do you consider yourself most knowledgeable in, and is there anything about it that you think is the most interesting to know?
Congrats! PhD student in condensed matter physics/electrochemistry here! Loads of high-surface-area carbon materials (e.g. activated charcoal, supercapacitor electrodes) are made using toxic chemicals to increase their surface area, but there's plenty of non-toxic and waste biological matter (e.g. pine needles) which when carbonised do this themselves. Using pine needles as an example, under heating and carbonisation of carbohydrate structures etc. within the leaves, really useful minerals (e.g. magnesium) present within them both react with the carbon lattice to create disorder and intercalate between the graphitic layers which teases them apart. These "mineral porogens" are then washed out, leaving behind micro- and nanopores.
There are soooo many ways of working with nature to create very intricate and deliberately engineered microstructures with really basic equipment - I did this with nothing but a hot plate, tube furnace, and mortar & pestle! Warmed pine needles on a hot plate made the lab smell DIVINE.
:party-parrot-science:
There should be no reason that I can't replicate that with a frying pan right? I'm assuming also that the needles are washed out with distilled water or something chemically inert like that.
Yep! I carbonised samples between 600 and 1200 C, well within the temperature range of a gas stove, and aye distilled water would be fine! I used ultrapure but that's just because you get these things literally on tap in labs
I read an interesting paper a while back that used glycerol and a microwave to do something similar with pollen grains. Replicating that experiment was interesting - turns out glycerol can get hot.
i work in the instrument building side of astro, so i really want to bully you for being a chemist, but i can't. that's super cool actually.