"Importantly, gels have properties of both solids and liquids so these conducting gels are potentially ideal to bridge between the soft, wet world of biology and the hard, dry world of electronics."Babatunde Okesola, University of York
Scientists at the University of York have developed a gel that can extract precious metals such as silver and gold from waste to form a hybrid nanomaterial with a range of potential high-tech applications.
Discarded electronic devices are an ever-increasing waste stream containing high-value precious metals such as silver and gold. Making use of this resource was the inspiration for the research by the team from the Department of Chemistry at York.
Chemistry researchers David Smith and Babatunde Okesola discovered that self-assembling gels derived from sorbitol, a simple sugar, could selectively extract precious metals from complex mixtures of the kinds of metals typically found in waste produced by the electronics or mining industries.
On exposure to the gel, not only were the precious metals selectively extracted, but they were then converted into conducting nanoparticles via an in situ chemical reduction process caused by the nanofibres of the gel network. These conducting nanoparticles become embedded in the gel, providing it with enhanced electrical conductance.
Fellow chemistry researchers, Alison Parkin and Sindhu Suravaram, helped demonstrate the reduction mechanism that converts the metal ions into nanoparticles and explored the conducting nature of the resulting soft materials. The research is published in Angewandte Chemie.
"Importantly, gels have properties of both solids and liquids so these conducting gels are potentially ideal to bridge between the soft, wet world of biology and the hard, dry world of electronics," said Okesola. "Being able to 'wire up' this interface will be of increasing importance in future technologies."
"We hope to go on and test our gels using real-world electronic waste, and also explore the potential applications of the resulting materials at the interface between biology and electronics," said Smith. This should lead to the researchers using the gels to convert waste into new soft materials capable of high-tech applications in their own right.
This story is adapted from material from the University of York, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.