EL PERIÓDICO and the Barcelona Materials Science Institute (ICMAB, CSIC) publish a series of videos and articles every Wednesday until September 7 as part of the popular science project ‘YouMaker: this is how science is done’. This is content in which various experts will explain in a didactic way the processes for preparing materials used in the fields of energy, electronics and medicine, such as batteries or solar cells, from their laboratories and with the participation of professional science communicators.
Can you imagine having a paper factory in a laboratory? And that the factory is made up of small bacteria that do not stop producing day and night? Well, it’s not science fiction. There is a type of bacteria that produce cellulose fibers 24/7 and manage to intertwine them to form cellulose membranes that look like sheets of paper! A very pure, very fine and very resistant cellulose.
An ICMAB team is working on this, including researchers Anna Laromaine and Mariano Campoy-Quiles, who are developing a material called thermopaper with this bacterial nanocellulose. Thermopaper is not only made of cellulose, but also has carbon nanotubes in its structure, which give it high electrical conductivity, necessary for the application they are looking for: they want to create a thermoelectric material!
electrical voltage
Thermoelectric materials are those that generate an electrical voltage from a temperature difference. They are very useful materials for harnessing the heat given off by electrical devices, for example, and converting it into electricity, or for generating energy from the temperature difference between the ground and the air.
Thermopaper could be used to power sensors for vineyard irrigation systems, taking advantage of the difference in temperature between the air and the ground, or it could cover electronic devices and thus reuse the heat they emit, preventing energy from being dissipated by empty. Furthermore, thermopaper is a biodegradable material and the carbon nanotubes that form it can be reused many times for future thermopaper or new applications.
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If you want to know more about this fantastic material and discover how it is made, don’t miss the video “How is thermopaper made?” of the YouMaker project: this is how science is done, with the scientific communicator Guillermo Orduña, the researcher Anna Laromaine, from the Nanoparticles and Nanocomposites Group, and the researcher Mariano Campoy-Quiles from the ICMAB Nanostructured Materials by Energy Group.
YouMaker is a project of the Barcelona Institute of Materials Science (ICMAB, CSIC) in collaboration with the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) of the Ministry of Science and Innovation.