If you've ever watched a cookie shake in a blender you
can
see visually how the particles stick up in the rotating
bolus
of semisolid ice cream for awhile then get
reincorporated
into the bulk. If there are sprinkles the sprinkles rotate
which are on top and most sticky-outy.
That could
be possible with polymers, that is the
polymer
would have a memory-material urge to internally rotate
and push out, so if it were a rubber with catalyst
sprinkles,
acting as cooled rubber at room temperature the surface
would change which sprinkles were on top and outside.
Twisted rubber as a kind of metaphor and very near the
actual technology: if you take a condom, twist the
center
say 100 times it will rotate 100 times to reach
equilibrium
again, so again it may be possible to put a twist in a blob
of polymer, or 100+ circular twists that then resolves
(unwinds) itself if cooled down to super slowness by
rotating (and again, bringing new and different sprinkles
to
the top.)
So, you've got a plastic blob that spends 100 days, or
4000
days gradually untwisting from memory plastic rotaion
effects, one full time-delay rotation every 24 hours.
what
do you do with it? Change chemistry! Load it up with
catalysts and reactive chemical reagents of course as
"sprinkles".
Due to the autorefreshing of the surface the polymer
form
always presents fresh surface to the reaction liquid or
gas
so fresh reagent or catalyst always faces the other
reactants in solution or at gases. This has notable
benefit
at catalysts (and enzymes), this could make it so a
catalytic converter always has a fresh surface to remove
pollution. It could be used to make always-fresh surface
catalysts for the oil and gas refining industry or the
chemical process industries to make other chemicals in
bulk even more cheaply than they are made now.
The long lasting duration of auto-refresh self-stir
catalyst-
in-polymers could make it so the chemical process
industry
had to reload catalysts into continuous process reactors
much less often, maintaining and extending their
continuous, highly value effective non-batch continuous
mode.
It is even possible that this "always fresh sprinkles
outside
on top" effect makes it so already studied catalytic
chemicals that previously did not function long enough or
that "fouled" easily could be back in the running as
chemical catalysts. One advantage is that these other
catalysts may have preferred yield profiles, that is they
make 98% something instead of 80% something. Self-stir
polymer matrix for catalysts increases the number of
actual chemical catalyst unique chemicals available for
reactions. This also makes new cheaper catalytic
converter
(antipollution) materials possible, because the chemists
can design new catalysts around short-lifetime catalyst
chemistry which might use cheaper metals.
If you do not like supercooled twisty condom rubber as a
metaphor for the technology, there is a completely
different way to do it: abradable laser scored mica
sandwiche. Basically you coat mica with a catalyst, hold
all
the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands of layers together with a central bolt, then
just
tumbling around the reaction vessel the mica abrades
and
disintegrates predictably, always exposing fresh catalyst
surface on the laminate shape. A laser scores the mica
sandwiches as the mica is produced (and of course pre-
use)
so it extra-predictably breaks down, also you don't have
to
use mica you can just use any predictable disintegration
from abrasion polymer as a sandwich layer.