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When most people think of liquid metal, they think of the T-1000 from "Terminator 2." Steve Lustig sees a chemistry kit.

Recent research from Lustig, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Northeastern University, provides new insights into how organic chemistry can be done in high-temperature liquid metals to change their chemical makeup. The foundational work done by Lustig and the researchers involved in this paper, in Carbon Trends, opens up pathways to create entirely new kinds of organic metals with direct impacts on everything from electronics to engineering.

"This opens up the possibility of designing and achieving completely new types of materials," Lustig says. "There really are no materials that are quite like this where you have a metal and organic structures inside the metal that seem to be bonded together in ways that have not been documented in the literature before."

The challenge with liquid metals has long been even being able to understand that chemistry can occur inside of them. As a solvent to which chemists can add a solute to create a chemical solution, liquid metals are tough to work with for understandable reasons: They're opaque and generally impermeable.

It creates a problem for chemists and chemical engineers. Suddenly, the tools and methods they normally use to probe into the results of their work are ineffective. Lustig says the only way for chemists to validate and diagnose their work on liquid metals was to mechanically test bulk samples, which provides very limited information, or investigate slices of the material. The latter ends up damaging the material, with most damage done on the surface, the only place chemists are able to investigate the results of their experiments.

To avoid these pitfalls, the researchers found a novel use for a tried-and-true method: inelastic neutron scattering. As the name implies, inelastic neutron scattering involves dispersing neutrons through a material, using the atomic vibrations of the material to understand more about its makeup.

The researchers conducted neutron scattering experiments on aluminum and theoretical analysis on copper and silver. What they found was a highly effective way of actually being able to understand the organic chemistry within the liquid metals.

"The observation that we can use neutrons to go through the metal and get fingerprints of the molecules through their normal bonding vibrations was quite useful to be able to prove that chemistry is actually done," Lustig says. "It's really exciting because even our first attempt was very fruitful in being able to make some very definitive conclusions about what kinds of molecules existed after our chemistry in the liquid metals at rather high temperatures and which kind of molecules did not exist."

Their chemical findings and this new methodology could have big implications for the creation of materials like covetics, nano-carbon infused metals, and metallocarbons. There has not been a standard or proven way of conducting the kind of organic chemistry needed to advance covetics, which are highly useful in consumer electronics and power systems because of their conductivity.

Lustig says it's been intuitively understood that putting organic molecules, like polymers, into metals changes almost every property of the metal. Being able to actually diagnose what those changes are could push the covetics field forward in exciting ways. Lustig points to use cases for lighter-weight aircraft design and higher-efficiency renewable energy systems, but the applications for these kinds of materials are seemingly endless.

"It's likely that a well-made covetic material could actually have interesting mechanical properties and also even better electronic properties," Lustig says. "It's possible that we can get materials that conduct much better than anything we know of. That has ramifications for electrical energy transport and storage. It's possible that we can use less material for the same conductivity, which means that things that store and need to use the electricity can be lighter."

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News .