The neutralization of chemical weapons usually requires complex and bulky equipment that may not be available to soldiers on the battlefield. To help solve this problem, a team of scientists from University of California led by professor of nanoengineering Joseph Wang created a self-propelled micromotor that helps decompose liquid chemical weapons during their movement.
A photo from open sources
One of the main strategies for eliminating chemical weapons is mixing it with water and a caustic composition like sodium peroxide. In the USA, this method is used to neutralize old stockpiles of chemical weapons and requires heavy and expensive industrial equipment, as well as large volumes of peroxide. An attempt to deploy the necessary equipment in countries like Syria, torn by civil war, is an extremely non-trivial task.
The new micromotor offers a simpler solution to this Problems. Built around an internal catalytic platinum layer, the motor is a conical microtube with external polymer layer. In an experiment, scientists mixed these tiny motors with hydrogen peroxide and activator and added this mixture to organophosphate pesticide (which is chemically similar to organophosphate fighting substances affecting the nervous system). As a result, hydrogen peroxide was oxidized, creating oxygen bubbles that, coming out of the wide end of the microtubes, forced them move.
Micromotor movements and bubbles formed helped mix the chemical neutralizing hydrogen peroxide with organophosphate, allowing it to be decomposed into much shorter terms and with lower peroxide costs compared to others methods. Wang and his team discovered that 1.5 million micromotors in 10 grams of pesticide work the same way mechanical mixer rotating at 200 rpm a minute.
Researchers say their technology may used for general acceleration of chemical reactions, and can be especially useful in microreactors, which are usually too small for traditional mechanical mixing. Details of the new technology were recently published in the journal. “Angewandte Chemie”.
