Sydney Nano’s projects include water from thin air

The University of Sydney’s nanoscience institute has launched five ambitious research projects.

University of Sydney nanoscientist Chiara Neto is inspired by the behaviour of plants. Picture: Britta Campion.

The University of Sydney’s nanoscience institute has launched five ambitious research projects that it believes are both achievable and likely to deliver huge benefits to society.

The signature projects, dubbed “grand challenges”, use the university’s growing expertise in the science of the very small and engages researchers from across many disciplines.

“We’re filtering out those projects which aren’t really big-picture and addressing the really important problems,” said Ben Eggleton, director of the institute which is known as Sydney Nano. The five challenges are to:

● Draw water from the air in usable quantities through condensation without input of energy.

● Build nano robots which can be let loose in the body to diagnose and treat disease.

● Work on the nanoscale to change manufacturing processes and make them carbon-neutral.

● Ensure safety of nano materials used by consumers in products such as pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, including sunscreen.

● Discover new materials by building them from the ground up using quantum science.

The leader of the water condensation grand challenge, chemistry professor Chiara Neto, said the key to solving the problem was developing materials that stayed cool in the sun — cold enough to condense water from the atmosphere in full daylight.

The secret is a material that both reflects sunlight (to avoid heating up) and radiates heat in the infra-red part of the spectrum (to get even colder). Because the atmosphere is transparent to certain wavelengths of infra-red, such radiation transfers the heat directly to the cold of space.

Professor Neto’s team is working to incorporate nano materials with these properties in paint so it is easy to apply to a surface.

To improve the condensation performance, her team also uses a technique borrowed from a beetle which lives in Africa’s Namib desert, whose hard back is water-­repellent but covered with tiny water-attracting bumps.

The bumps promote condensation while the water-repelling surface around them causes the water to run off, allowing the beetle to drink the water and survive in the arid environment.

Professor Neto said she gains inspiration from seeing the way surface properties are used in nature, including the leaves of plants.

Sydney Nano is one of eight multidisciplinary initiatives at the university which bring researchers in from across the faculties. Professor Eggleton said that the five grand challenges” were ­selected from 10 finalists at an offsite meeting last month in which the teams pitched to a group of senior academics from across all faculties.

He said that while most of the winning teams drew researchers from physics, chemistry, health sciences, engineering and pharmacy, there was strong engagement from academics in business, social sciences and humanities, and architecture and design, which helped keep the focus on broad goals. The success of Sydney Nano relied on all schools and faculties in the university “coming along for the ride”, he said.