Invention could benefit pharmaceutical, automotive, food processing, carbon capture and other industries – ScienceDaily

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Aerosols are small particles that can have a significant impact on the Earth’s climate and human health.

For example, these tiny droplets can reflect incoming sunlight back into outer space, helping to cool a warming planet. Or they can be used to give medicines to the lungs, especially to treat respiratory conditions.

Thus, the ability to more accurately control how aerosols move is critical to pharmaceutical sciences and climate research. Aerosol science is also a major aspect of many industries, everything from automobiles to food processing.

Now, scientists have published a study describing an advanced device—a new skin sprayer—that is relatively inexpensive to build and operate.

says lead author Sankar Raju Narayanasamy, Ph.D., research associate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and research associate at the Berkeley Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

“This development is an important breakthrough that has the potential to have a wide range of applications,” says Narayanasamy, who conducted the research as a researcher with BioXFEL, a US National Science Foundation-funded research consortium led by the University at Buffalo, Hauptmann-Woodward Institute for Medical Research (HWI) and institutions. partner.

Martin Trebbin, PhD, SUNY Empire Assistant Professor of Chemistry Innovation at the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, is a co-author of the study.

He says that “single-diffusion aerosols of controlled volumes are useful in sample-environment tools, such as mass spectrometry, electron-free lasers (XFELs), and electron microscopy, which are used to study biomolecules for structural analysis and drug discovery.”

Trebbin, who says the research is “a significant achievement in fluid dynamics and microfluidics,” is a core faculty member at UB RENEW Institute and holds an appointment at the BioXFEL Center for Science and Technology.

The technique is described in a study, “Special type of skin based on self-sequencing instability of multi-diffusion two-dimensional sprays from an anisotropic liquid jet device,” published Jan. 11 in Cell Press. Cell Physical Science Reports.

The study represents a third-generation advance in liquid jet technology. Liquid cylindrical jets first came in 1998, followed by flat liquid laminar jets in 2018.

The new skin jet is the first of its kind because it produces homogeneous droplets in a two-dimensional image, says co-author Hoi-Ying N. Holman, PhD, director of the Berkeley Synchrotron Infrared Structural Biology Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In the past 20 years, scientists have experimented with many methods, such as piezoelectric actuation or localized heating, to precisely control the movement of aerosols. However, the use of these techniques is limited because they tend to alter the samples the aerosols scientists use to study them. This is particularly true with biological samples.

In the study, the researchers discuss the important role that analytical fluid dynamics — a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems involving fluid flows — plays in their work.

This includes explaining the devices’ “jet diameter, skin system, and angle of spread,” says Ramakrishna Vasirdi, PhD, co-first author and research scientist at SOLEIL, the French synchrotron facility in Paris.

“This phenomenon is characterized experimentally by measuring the angle with respect to flow rate, inter-droplet distances, droplet shapes, and the repeatability of these parameters,” he adds.

In the study, the team also explains how to build such devices, which are relatively inexpensive.

This work was supported by the group of excellence “Hamburg Center for Ultrafast Imaging – Structure, Dynamics and Control of Matter at the Atomic Level” of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The work was conducted with the Berkeley Structural Biology Infrared Imaging Program (BSISB), which is supported by the US Department of Energy. It was conducted under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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