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.
-- beanangel, May 06 2021

//If you do not like supercooled twisty condom rubber…// - it’s like you’re reading my mind
-- hippo, May 06 2021


Aren't most catalytic converters made of things that don't like to twist and untwist? Like platinum and metal?

I like the whole concept of adding little twisty stresses to chemistry to see what happens. I say, add some convincing- looking graphs and charts, and submit it to the Nobel committee or somewhere where people with degrees, lab coats, and test tubes hang out.

At the very least, make a nanoscopic rubber band airplane.
-- RayfordSteele, May 06 2021


Partially rewritten.

Oh, the quoted part is for making it better, you may have read an earlier version with that in it.

Basically, if you imagine the little sprinkles in the polymer that contain the catalyst or reagent to be coated, like vitamin E gelcaps then: Extend availability/lifetime of chemically reactive compounds by [putting them in little vitamin e capsules] or incorporating them into stressed, folded or twisted inert gradual remotioning substrates. [you can use millifiore technique to put stripes of catalyst or reagent with a coating layer at a polymer blob] As the substrate motionizes/untwists/rebounds, clean and unused catalyst material or reagents are exposed for reactions.
-- beanangel, May 06 2021


When I run the thought experiment with the twisted condom, the inside and outside of the condom do not change places. But the application proposed for this idea seems to require that inside and outside should change places.

So we put down the condom and switch on the blender. Then inside and outside do change places, but then the movement is not driven by the unwinding elasticity of the substance being stirred.
-- pertinax, May 06 2021


Myosin and Actin are the muscles molecular motor. Maybe twisting long fibres interlocks these molecules and when supplied with ATP they slowly walk out the twist. A lot of accurate molecular geometry to work out though.

This idea does sound like a material with a whole lot of those suction cup pop-up toys as molecules or a slowly unbinding velcro.
-- wjt, May 08 2021


//slowly unbinding velcro// That's new to me and very intriguing; the memory polymer velcro layer-sphere could just detach at a predictable rate to release fresh catalyst/fresh catalyst surface. Gradual-reveal velcro is a little like the stack of mica coasted with catalyst though.
-- beanangel, May 09 2021



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