>> The science research that is underway
on board the International Space Station covers a wide range
of disciplines.
We talk most days about the work that's being done
to protect the astronauts.
There is also a variety of other sciences.
Things like astronomy and biology and physics.
There've been a series of experiments
that have taken advantage of the weightlessness of space
to investigate the behavior of colloids.
One of those experiments is known
as the InSPACE experiment, and it was recently featured
in a Science@NASA article about the development not
of smart materials, but in fact of genius materials.
The principle investigator on InSPACE is Dr. Eric Furst.
He joins us this morning from his office
at the University of Delaware.
Dr. Furst good morning.
Would you start by giving us the short version
of what a colloid is and how you got interested
in researching them in the first place?
>> Sure, good morning Pat.
Colloids basically refer
to small particles disbursed in a fluid.
These particles are on the order of maybe tens to hundreds
of nanometers to micrometers in scale.
It's a unique, basically it refers to a unique length scale
of matter where the material is many billions of atoms still
in size, and yet small enough.
So small that you'd have to use a microscope to see it
or even more exotic techniques to see the particles.
But what that does is it confers certain properties
on those particles.
And one of the special properties is they exhibit
Brownian in motion, random thermal motion.
And that gives them all sorts of really neat things that use
and technologies and we like to study in some
of our scientific work.
Why I'm interested in colloids is
because they're really interesting building blocks
as matter to assemble other structures from
or other useful functional types of materials.
Genius materials as some people have called them.
And you know, there's actually been a wide variety
of thing we can imagine we would want to use technologically
in the future, as well as lots of things
that surround us today.
Many of the customer care products
that we use are actually structured on this length scale.
They're actually colloidal materials.
The shampoos that we have, detergents, fabric softeners,
paints, these are all colloidal materials.
>> And you've been investigating with the InSPACE experiment
on this space station as far back as Expedition 6.
Have you been doing, looking at the same thing
in each iteration of this?
>> Well not quite.
It has been awhile since we kicked these off.
And actually some of these, the experimental ideas stretch back
to even when I was doing my PhD
with my advisor a number of years ago.
You know, it's part of the iterate of aspects of science
that every time you ask a question and you start
to answer that, ten more questions, you know,
come up as you peer into this sort of frontier
between what we know and what we don't know.
And you know, that can really lead
to some exciting markets what's happened here
in the InSPACE experiments.
When we first started off, we were looking at, you know,
just a structure of these materials under magnetic fields.
And we got some ideas about how we might be able to change
or tailor those structures that would give us insight
into how we can make new materials here on earth.
And that's what led to InSPACE 2.
And from that, that's grown into an InSPACE 3 project.
>> What did you think was going to happen
when you applied a magnetic force to colloids?
>> Yes, these specific experiments look
at some special particles basically.
These are colloids that are magnetically responsive.
And first they're mainly model materials for work
that we do here on the ground where we use electric fields
to guide the assembly of particles
in directed self-assembly.
Anyway, these magnetic particles respond in a magnetic field,
and we know a lot about that from ground basic experiments.
If you place a magnetic field on one of these.
They're fluids initially, just like a dilute paint.
If you took a latex paint, it would flow llike that.
But when you put them in a magnetic field
of sufficient strength, they freeze up.
They become a solid.
And so on earth there's technology based
on that called magnetorheological dampers
and that transition from a liquid
to a solid is called magnetorheological effect.
So we were pretty sure that we would see data fact
that we could form these sort of solids in space.
But what we were really interested
in in the experiments were well what would happen if we turn
that field on and off, toggle that field on and off,
with the suspension structure change?
And in fact, it does.
That's the study that we initiated, and we were looking
at how these structures coarsen with time.
That give us insight into how all those materials are
assembling and forming,
essentially in equilibrium structure that's dictated
by their shapes and their interactions.
And that's really the basis of these sort of materials
that form themselves, what we call self-assembly.
>> Are there, what are our applications
that we might understand for how that could be used
to our advantage, either in space and on the ground?
>> Yeah, I mean, in my laboratory we've used this sort
of self-assembly principle to make materials
with interesting optical properties that might be useful
with color displays for instance, like electronic inks.
We've made materials that have ultralow thermal connectivity
so that they are nice thermal barriers.
That would certainly have applications in turbines,
for instance, here on earth.
Gas-based turbines.
Aircraft turbines, as well as potential space applications.
You know, the ability to structure matter
and actually get that structure to form on its on spontaneously,
gives us new manufacturing methods for nanotechnologies.
So that's one of the things
that we're really interested in and excited about.
And, getting that structure to form, you know,
it confers the properties with how that material is going
to interact with energy.
How it's going to interact with chemical species.
And so there's many facets that that, you know,
that that can have an impact.
And you know, again, sort of, we use materials
like this on an everyday basis.
So you know, it just throws the sort of breadth
of what can be impacted by that.
>> I suspect that there might be more worthwhile research to do.
Is there going to be an InSPACE 4?
>> I hope so.
We have, you know, like I said, every time you ask a question,
you get at least ten more back.
We've discovered some really interesting things
in these last experiments based on how we can change the shape
of a particle to guide different structures to form.
And we've been doing corresponding experiments here
on the ground.
There's a lot of things that we would like to try.
And with some of the facilities that have been sent up
and have been developed on the space station,
it's really such a unique laboratory
to us to access and to use.
It's a phenomenal research activity.
And having, you know one
of the really key things is taking advantage
of the microgravity for us.
But also having the hands of the astronauts on those experiments,
the feedback that we get from them allows us to take advantage
of that really unique environment in space.
But in a much deeper and richer way than I think if we could,
you know, just send an automated experiment up.
It gives us that feedback loop.
And, you know, that observation and that control
that humans have in the laboratory.
So, you know, I hope we can take advantage of that some more.
>> We look forward to seeing it.
Dr. Furst, thank you very much.
I appreciate talking to you this morning.
>> Thank you.
Have a great day.
>> Dr. Eric Furst is the, is the principal investigator
of the InSPACE experiment, which has been underway
on the International Space Station now
for a number of years.