Ordinarily spilled beverages and electronics make for an unfortunate situation as anyone who’s tried to survive the presence of young children and pets can attest. Oddly enough, researchers at the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences in Singapore have used their observations of coffee stains to develop a technique for coating television and computer screens to forestall electromagnetic fields from the devices. Unlike the traditional sputtering of indium tin oxide onto the screen, the new method promises to be much less expensive and to require no clean room.Essentially, the researches noticed that as spilled coffee dries the particles that had been suspended in the hot water are driven to the edges of the spill ultimately producing a circular stain. The coffee granules are being arranged or assembled by the processes of convection and evaporation. Next, researchers turned to fine gold particles rather than coffee. By adding suitable surfactants and controlling temperature and the evaporation and convection rates, the researchers were able to create a network of conductive gold nano-particles that’s described as finer than silk.Read the abstract of their paper online.
Coffee Spills & TV Screens
