Nano Sharks

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I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Dara, yes.

You know how sometimes our listeners write in with what feels like wacky, off-the-wall ideas, but actually end up being granted in scientific fact and genuinely could make good businesses.

Yeah, our listeners do do that.

If you're an angel investor.

This is the pair you've got to be, you know, honestly.

We are throwing money away here.

If only the British government would see us as the source of the future of science technology in the country and innovation.

Anyway, Wayne Jacobs has come up with an idea.

He thinks this is going to make him a very, very rich person indeed.

He asks, if you painted a Formula One car in a matte nano paint so that it resembled the pattern and texture of shark skin,

would it have less air resistance and go faster?

He goes on to say, we know the rough pattern on shark skin helps it to cut through the water better, so maybe at a nano level, a paint could do this on any object traveling through air.

By the way, he used to work for a racing car manufacturer.

Oh, so it's not just a wild idea.

This is...

I think he could be on something.

I mean, could it also be shaped like a shark?

And make the play the jaws music as it went around.

I think if the Formula One drivers, just for one race of season, actually rode on the backs of sharks.

I think one Formula One every year should be wacky races.

You know, all the cars have

kind of those horns, you know, that you squeeze or whatever.

And yeah, and they're just silly contraptions with wings flapping up and down.

Yeah.

Occasional fire blasting across the chest.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Wackeries are Mario Kart.

You're right.

Two things are synonymous in my mind.

Do you know, by the way, that I used to work in Formula One?

Have I mentioned this to you?

You have not mentioned that to me.

I still like to brag.

Were you on the...

Were you one of those people taking the tires off, right?

I was a grid girl.

I could not be further away from a grid girl in every direction.

No, I was near an animcist.

Do you want to lasted?

How long did she last?

About two months.

Okay.

So we're going to see how that extensive knowledge that I built up over that time is going to come into play.

Luckily, we have people with us who can definitely tell us whether Wayne is onto something.

Dr.

Jess Wade is a lecturer in functional materials at Imperial College London.

And Manish Tiwari is a professor of nanoengineering at University College London.

Both of them interest in how structures occur naturally can help us build better materials at the nano scale.

Manish, we think of sharks, well I think of sharks having smooth, shiny skin, but but that's not what's happening is it?

No not really.

It's amazing how fascinating they are.

So in fact if you look closely they are covered with these things called dermal denticles which I think translates into skin teeth

literally.

So they have these structures that are very similar to dentin this protein and on top of that you have enamel which is exactly the material that we have in our teeth as well.

And they are hard and they are very well oriented.

And they vary all the way from the tip of a shark to the backside.

It's amazing.

Sharks are already frightening enough animals about knowing that their skin is just covered in teeth.

Yes.

Yes.

I mean, but we're talking tiny.

We are really talking tiny.

So it's anywhere from, let's say, a tenth of a millimeter to about a millimeter.

Depends on the species and so on.

I mean, sharks have been around for 350 million years.

So they've had some time to adjust.

They know what they're doing.

They know what they're doing.

Exactly.

And is it like a layer of scales

that's right so actually they are different forms of a scale that we would expect in a fish except these are hard because these are very predatory so it's useful to have these teeth like structure to protect themselves against other sharks that might be attacking them and things like that okay but they have this other beautiful property that you would not expect our teeth to do, which is to reduce drag, which I suspect is what we will talk about.

Well, we should probably say there are different types types of drag going on here.

At the sort of bigger scale, the scale of the shark itself.

I mean, that is like a beautifully tuned animal as well.

The maximal effect in terms of drag reduction does indeed come from the streamlined shape, which we call form drag.

So that's due to the pressure difference between the front of the fish to the back.

And then there is this friction.

which is what you would expect as well.

If you know a bit of water is flowing past the surface, you would expect a bit of friction.

So there is at least two different kinds.

Aerospace engineers or naval naval engineers will give you seven or eight different types, but those are the broad types.

I mean we'll talk about the frictional drag for this because obviously the Formula One cars are going to keep coming back to us whether this have their shape.

It's whether or they can gain an advantage from this having similar kind of surface as the sharks have.

What is it doing on the surface of the shark?

This is particularly useful because sharks can actually swim pretty fast.

So they can get into what are called turbulent flows.

So this is like chaotic flow when things go really fast.

And what happens then is you have these nice circular flow patterns which are called eddies and when you have this teeth like structure which is appropriately shaped you can start to lock these eddies on surface which starts to reduce the drag in a really rapid flow you wouldn't expect a rough structure to do that would you particularly if it is randomly rough so that's why these skin teeth have this nice groove like structure that are able to actually trap vortices and that helps reduce the drag particularly when they're going fast and because it's a living animal they actually undulate so this teeth can actually go up and down

and so they actually adjust themselves as they are flowing through.

See my understanding of eddies and I defer to the other person hosting this show a little bit in this.

If you've got a basin of water and you run your hand through it and you can see the water swirling off down

the side that's exactly the idea.

What sharks tend to do naturally with these eddies and trapping them is they create this nice slippery layer because water can be slippery if you can manage to trap it there, right?

So, that's where the slippery effect is coming from.

And it happens because they can adjust, they can do a much better job of actually retaining those eddies, if you will.

The way you're describing it, it sounds quite a lot like the idea behind a golf ball in the sense that, okay, you want a golf ball to travel really far, and so you don't want the friction of the air to slow it down as much as you possibly can.

So, you could try and get a beautifully smooth ball, lovely, nice, and slippery, and it would go further.

But instead, they're like, hang on a second, the slipperiest thing of all that we have access to is air.

So let's create these dimples, get little pockets of air inside them, and then the slipperiness.

So it's the same idea there.

It's exactly the same idea.

And it's something that helps trap the boundary layer, which is a layer of friction that develops when any fluid flows past the surface, which is where the friction effects are kind of important.

And what happens is, as this fluid flows, sometimes due to pressure difference, that layer separates.

And that increases the drag dramatically.

So, by creating these dimples, we are able to delay the separation of boundary layer.

So, are we using, it's the shark using, I suppose, would be the better question, but are we using turbulence in order to decrease the drag?

I love that way of thinking.

Yes, indeed.

That's very smart.

If you create a layer, a cloak

of bubbling swirling.

Controlled vortices.

Controlled vortices.

That's it.

So, yeah, and that means that the actual large body moves past you more smoothly.

Exactly.

Well, that's very smart.

And it's actually even more smart because the sharks will undulate as they swim, right?

So these control vortex patterns changes along the body of the shark.

So it can be a lot more efficient.

They can reduce drag by 10 to 12%,

which is a big deal.

That's massive.

Yeah, it's massive.

Okay, Jess, let me come to you here because I know that it's not only shark skin that has this property, right?

Sure.

Loads of things have awesome nanostructures and microstructures.

Talk to me.

So if you have a lotus leaf, there you've got various different length scales of structures from kind of microstructures, these capilli which are formed in the epidermis, the cells around the outside of that plant.

Those kind of have micron scales, you know, a thousandths of a metre.

But if you zoom even even closer than that, you have these nanostructures overlain on that of these kind of little wax crystallites that kind of protrude from the surface.

And that modifies the surface properties.

So you've got a microstructure.

On top of that, you've got this kind of nanostructure.

And in that case, you're not trying to change drag or anything like that.

You're actually trying to make it hydrophobic.

So you're trying to make it water-hating.

So that if a droplet of water lands on the top of that lotus leaf, it can't kind of spread out in the way that a water droplet usually does when it lands on a surface.

It kind of sits there like a perfect sphere.

And actually, then you have these nano hairs on top of that that push the water droplet off.

So when you have a droplet of water landing on it, the interaction between dirt on the lotus leaf and the water is stronger than between the dirt on the leaf and the leaf.

So the act of water dropping on it will move that dirt off, which is amazing.

A A self-drying leaf.

Self-drying, self-cleaning, you name it, lotus leaf is doing it.

And then they're super sophisticated things in insect legs, so they can use that to kind of propel across water as well.

Water boatman, is that what they call it?

Water boatman shoes.

Where they can sit on top of the

little skippers who kind of skim across the surface.

Yeah, they're just amazing.

And that again is because they're hydrophobic.

And their legs have these kind of nanostructures within them that help them propel and push water away from them.

So if you have a droplet of water to minimise the surface energy of that droplet, it will be a sphere because geometrically that would minimize the surface energy.

If it sits on a surface that's hydrophobic, that has these incredibly intricate structures, it can't spread out.

You actually get these air pockets that form on the surface that push that water droplet upwards.

You know, the leaf can do it, but also the legs of these insects can do it, can push the water away from them so that they can propel across the surface of water.

So, are there other insects that can do this, man?

Absolutely.

Butterfly is my favorite example, actually.

Butterflies never get wet.

Exactly.

One.

And secondly, secondly, they can actually take impacts of water droplets, which is a lot harder problem to do.

So they exist in rainforests, for example, where things come down at tens of meters per second.

And big, fat, ploppy rain as well.

Exactly, exactly.

So we used to have a lot of butterflies in India, you know, which has got a tropical climate.

And I would like to confess that I probably might have broken wings of quite a few of them.

So they are quite flimsy, right?

So they should not be able to take impacts of water droplets in monsoon rain, yet they do because they have the kind of structure that Jess was talking about and they're floppy, they're flexible, so they're able to sag down a little bit as the droplet falls down.

And so you have this mechanics and combination of micro and nanostructure that combines together in order to give you the property.

When we say nano, how small are we talking?

So our hair, depending on the hair.

That's the benchmarker is going to pick.

Belgium for big things hair for small things

so it's a billionth of a meter it's how far your nails grow in one second

so every second your nails grow one nanometer right

that's great yeah so your hair is on a huger scale than that way huger scale than that okay and paint for example if you put one layer of paint up there whatever that's way beyond way beyond the nano regime you're in micro so if when we talk about mimicking this stuff we're talking about incredibly thin layers incredibly thin structures when we're talking about kind of what's on on an insect's leg or on the surface of a lotus leaf, they're kind of little hairs and little structures.

In a butterfly, for example, the structure is often what gives it its colour because the length scales over which you're seeing these cool features start to interact with visible light.

So you'll have something that doesn't have actually any pigment colour.

It's only when light shines on it and interacts with that kind of grating or that surface that it becomes colourful at all, which is why when you go to the Natural History Museum and look at all the butterflies, they retain their colour even when they die because the colour is coming from the structure, not from a pigment.

There are other structures, though, right?

I'm thinking about chiral structures here because I'm sure that plays into this as well, doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I'm super interested in chirality in general.

Chirality, for everyone who's not a chiral enthusiast, is a property of symmetry and shape.

And chiral objects exist as a pair of non-superimposable mirror images, so left and right-handed.

But we see chirality a lot in plants and a lot of barks of trees, and in even some insects' fibres in some ways, to try and impart some strength.

So, having some kind of chiral assembly or packing can make things more strong or make things more robust and resistant to wind or make things grow in a particular direction.

So I'm imagining sort of hairs like down at this scale of like how fast your nails are growing.

And rather than just having them straight, if you have them as spirals, some going in some direction, some going in the other direction, you end up improving the structure of it.

Sometimes you'll have spirals that one will grow one way and one will grow the other way.

And I suppose that would probably impart some greater strength.

But also it will control how they interact with air and air moves over their surface.

And I think you can probably direct air in a clever way if you have some chiral nanostructure or chiral microstructure at least on top of a surface.

It's a very interesting idea, definitely.

And depending on the speed of the air, also, right?

Because if you go back to the shark teeth, it's also about different species having different sizes of teeth.

So, I would imagine it'll come down to the speed at which the air is flowing as well.

It's fascinating that you go down in terms of length scale and you start to have different kinds of interaction with fluid and light and what have have you.

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In a beetle shell, you have a material called chitin, which is this kind of biopolymer, and it stacks in this beetle shell so that every layer of this chitin is twisted a little bit with respect to the one below.

So you get this build-up of this kind of twisted assembly.

And what happens in this beetle shell is if you shine light on the back of it, it reflects back to you and its twisted light because of the packing structure of that chitin.

Our eyes can't see twisted light, but 3D cinema glasses can see twisted light.

So if you look through 3D cinema glasses and you look with one lens, you'll be able to see the colour of the beetle.

And if you look through the other lens, you can't see the colour at all.

And that's because the light that's coming back from this beetle is entirely twisted from the nanostructure of that chitin.

So I'll show it to you.

So is one of these polarised one way, one of them is polarised the other?

Yeah, there's 3D cinema glasses have a kind of clockwise and an anti-clockwise lens, and that gives you the perception of depth when you're watching 3D movies.

Got you.

But if you take one lens at a time.

Which ones?

Which ones?

Do the disappointing one for us?

That's what I always do scientifically.

Oh, but they're just black.

It's incredible, right?

That's very boring.

That's because the twist in the lens is opposite to the twist of the light being reflected.

Oh,

that, oh, that is

mind-blowing.

Really?

I mean, they look so

good.

And just these little beetles.

These little beetles can do this.

It's an amazing thing.

I should describe what I'm seeing here.

So these beetles, they're kind of emerald green, but they've got a sheen to them, like an orangey metallic undertone.

They're very, very beautiful until you look at them through the bad lens, in which case they just basically look like someone's got a bad problem with cockroaches.

So we have all these fantastic examples from nature of these things happening on a nano scale.

But can we recreate this?

Can we make this happen for ourselves?

We're so far not quite as good at nature, at doing it for a long time, at making kind of durable and stable nanostructures.

So, the remarkable thing about lotus leaves or beetles or butterflies is that these nanostructures persist.

You know, the lotus leaves can kind of self-heal.

If something happens to them, they can reform these bonds that will let this kind of super hydrophobic, in that case, scenario happen.

We have to study and understand these nanostructures.

So, a lot of the time, scientists do electron microscopy, so using electron microscopes rather than light microscopes to get this really precise nano-scale structural information and then find different ways to try and grow them.

You can kind of crudely make a nanomaterial from starting with a big material and smashing it up.

So you have a kind of top-down approach, which doesn't produce these glutaful, complex nanostructures that we're talking about here, but could make you nanoparticles if you wanted them for some particular application where you don't care so much if they're all consistent size.

Or you can do some chemistry so you can start to prepare things and let nanoparticles and nanostructures kind of nucleate out of a solution and do things like that.

Or you can do some kind of nano fabrication techniques where you're really precisely controlling the size and the dimensions of these nanostructures that you create.

In some cases, moving individual atoms, in some cases using a kind of pattern photo mask.

Sorry, sorry.

Have you got tweezers for individual atoms?

Little tiny microscopes, not light microscopes, but either electron microscopes or atomic force microscopes.

You can start to play around on those length scales.

But I suppose you want to meet somewhere in the middle where you've been able to do the sophisticated nanoengineering, but you can scale it.

You can say, we want to make a nanomaterial that we can put on commercial air flights to reduce drag, or we want to make something that we can make super hydrophobic.

You know, we can't just move every atom every time we want to build one of these things.

Okay, could you actually do this for the shark skin/slash teeth?

Yes, there's a number of companies that are trying to make structures that are micro-scale but can be done in a scalable manner.

So you can take a sheet of plastic, really,

then you can have very similar effect to what Shark does.

Well not as elegant and not as dynamic as Shark is able to do because it has had a bit more time than we do.

But we can actually start to learn the fluid mechanics of what is happening at this scale and use those principles to come up with structures that may be different, maybe easier to make, or do it in a way that can be practically scalable or

last on an airplane or survive on an airplane which the shark for all its greatness does not need to do.

That's interesting you'd mention that because there are companies who are attempting to do this.

One of them is Lufthansa which is assigned a nano film that sticks to the underside of its planes.

This is Sebastian Hartwig from BAS of Systems, the company that came up with this idea explaining how it works.

When you look at the shark skin there is a repetitive pattern on the skin surface.

of the shark and there are certain grooves on the structure and these grooves they are all oriented in parallel to the water stream and it's exactly this orientation and these grooves that are reducing the skin friction of the shark.

So, you have a very precise structure in the micrometer range with the riblet, and riplets are the extraction of all the geometry to something that can be industrialized.

So, we have developed this technology where we can press the structure into a material in a film which is hundred-something microns thick.

It's not 3D printed or etched or lasered or whatever one may think.

It's an imprint technology.

It's a self-adhering film so it's like a large sticker like 50 times 100 centimeter sticker and you can apply this easily on any kind of a surface.

We are currently equipping the fuselage of the of the aircraft and this reduces the drag or makes the aircraft more efficient by around about 1% and we are working on on extending the surface to more or less the entire aircraft surface where it makes sense.

And by this, we can increase from roughly 1% to 3%.

So when we are talking of a Boeing 777, it saves per aircraft per year around about 400 tons of kerosene, saving you around about 1,200, 250 tons of CO2 emissions.

We actually have some of the film here.

I mean, I'm holding on a metal plate on which there is an incredibly thin film on the top.

And if you run your finger along it, just straight along it, it just feels like a number surface.

But if you try to divert it, it sort of catches you and pushes you back into that straight line again.

I'm gonna actually let Jess go first because the level of excitement on her face that she was describing, the actual nanoscientist in the room.

Yeah.

Okay, just doing a few of the parallels just to feel it.

Yeah.

Okay, that's so it

is like an optical illusion, but with your hands.

That's amazing.

I said perfectly to describe it.

A real sensation of grip.

Because if you run your finger back and forth, I mean, you can tell there's real energy, right?

But this is enough to save 1,250 tons of

money.

Thank you, nanoscience.

I mean, that is small things make a big difference.

Well, really small things make a big difference.

There's an intermediate size regime that doesn't change that much.

But would it work for cars?

People are trying.

I should say with limited success, because on cars we have other things to worry about as well.

They're a lot more tactile.

People like to touch them.

There is issues around contamination of dust and other things that might complicate matters as well.

You just describe people as being tactile with their cars, which talks to me means people are stroking them.

But would I be damaging this surface by running my finger across it?

That's right.

So that's one of the biggest problems that nanotechnology has.

So when we start to make things small,

we might also make them weak.

So one of the challenges that this type of technology will face is how do we make it such that it is useful, it has the property that we want it to offer, but it doesn't make itself too weak to last.

Does that mean that we finally discovered the shark's greatest weakness?

Stroke is weak.

Because no one thinks it's enough.

Well, a grave wire is coming towards it.

No one thinks if I just

give it a diagonal stroke, I'm going to really throw this guy off.

Is there also an element of the fact that what the shark is swimming through is so much more dense than what you'd be driving a car through?

That's right.

So that's one aspect.

The other aspect is that it's a lot more viscous, and that has an effect as well.

So there's more scope there for maturity gains.

Absolutely.

And there's another layer of innovation that sharks have.

Because we are talking actually about skin of an animal, there is something called mucus layer that sits on top of the denticles that we were talking about, which gives it the slippery effect on top of the structural effects that were responsible for the vortices.

Just picking up on the mucus,

a sentence I love, Sarah.

Let's bring it back to the mucus.

This is a bit like, I don't know, oiling the golf ball in a way.

What's the advantage?

Is it an aerodynamic advantage?

Well, it's the friction advantage that we were talking about earlier.

Because it's a liquid-like layer, if the fluid tries to go past it, it will start to become slippery.

I was going to say, if you imagine walking over, you know, a layer of mucus, we might actually slip, right?

So it's that slippery effect as well on top of all the fluid mechanics related effects that we were talking about earlier.

And both of those are kind of important, feels like Prushak's case.

Is that an idea that we can copy?

Can we have a layer on top of something?

Yes, we can actually.

So, to what we were talking about earlier about lotus leaves, a lot of scientists across the globe have been actually trying to replicate what lotus leaf does that through natural evolutionary processes.

So, this is a normal cotton fabric,

a bit of cloth, exactly, that has a layer of coating that has nanostructure, and that makes it incredibly slippery.

So, if we try to actually put put a water droplet on top of it, we'll find a hard time doing that, actually.

Ah, this is beautifully hydrophobic.

That's so neat.

So, that's just beading straight off.

That's it.

So, imagine if you've got, I don't know, like a waxed jacket

where when you put water on it, instead of the water soaking in, these are like forming beads on top and then just running straight off.

That's it.

What clever thing have you done to this cotton to make that happen?

It's very similar to a lotus leaf, etc.

Except in this case, we actually grow these materials directly onto this piece of fabric and it becomes super hydrophobic now.

So, for example, the non-stick pans at home, they've got a lot of Teflon in them.

And that we now know has got adverse effect on health.

It tends to persist in the environment for a long time, and so on, although it has this beautiful, slippery property.

So, could we get that effect using materials that are environmentally safe?

And the nanopan, as I've decided to call it, the nanopan is the new cooking wear range I'm launching where it's all at a nano level.

Yeah.

You'd have a metal pan or whatever and then you'd place a layer then, an incredibly thin layer of something on top of it.

Exactly right.

And to maintain all the slipperiness, et cetera, that we are used to because we don't like to clean pans and stuff.

No, we really don't.

And that's the nanopan guarantee.

How much of this is looking at great examples from nature and going, well, how are we going to do that?

A lot of it.

Yeah.

And then it's how are we going to do that?

Let's go and speak to some chemists who know how to make these weird and wonderful molecules.

Then let's speak to some physicists material scientists and learn how we nail those properties let's go to electronic engineering and then let's write funny things in it using our lasers or whatever you can do to just have a laugh in the lab and then you make commercialize it and then you take it to the marketing department yeah

nanopan is a great name yeah

we're gonna take that from you now no no you can no no no this this is me putting that i'm signing it to myself in an envelope and i'm sealing the envelope now i own that if you did manage to make this this paint right for nanopan where would this be most useful i mean i'm thinking about how you were saying with the shark the viscosity of the water the fact that it travels at speed all of those things really matter would it would it be on ships that it would be helpful oh definitely so one of the problems that ships have is growth of barnacles which increases drag and you know leads to corrosion and what have you so if you could actually protect all of that from growing you would save a lot of fuel there too there are other applications domestic usage so for example if we could have jackets that don't allow water contamination and so on, it'll lead to a lot less cleaning, which means a lot less usage of things like detergents and so on.

All of that feeds into sustainability as well.

So, there is use of this stuff pretty much everywhere we look.

And in buildings, right?

To try and get self-cleaning buildings and windows that will clean and things like that.

But then, can you use a similar effect for cooling?

I mean, I'm thinking about like sunlight hitting buildings and warming them up, and

is there a possibility there?

Funny you would say that, actually.

So, people are actually working on that.

There are materials which radiate at a certain wavelength where the atmosphere is transparent, meaning it does not absorb that wavelength.

So if you can imagine having a paint which absorbs all the sunlight and radiates back where the atmosphere will not absorb it back, it's this principle called radiative cooling.

Then you could imagine cooling buildings down completely passively.

There is no moving parts or anything like that.

And it's not as efficient as we would like it to be,

to be useful for building cooling, but people are working on it.

it.

Okay, you know what?

I think we've not just come up with one multi-million matter idea.

And we've even forgotten the original, the Formula One thing.

Yeah, about Formula One, who cares about Formula One?

He wasn't even big enough.

By the way, sorry, to answer his question, though, would a coating of something and anything really help a Formula One car?

Not immediately, but we shouldn't rule out the possibility.

It could.

It could.

It could.

It could.

Don't know if that's enough for you, Angel Investors.

Well, thank you so much to our guests, Dr.

Jess Wade and Professor Manish to Murray.

Okay, well, the point of this programme was to see whether our questioner Wayne had a multi-million pound mega idea.

And it turns out he might not, but I do.

I do.

Sorry about that, Wayne.

That's how innovation works.

It goes fast.

And somebody goes, well, the original idea probably came from Formula One, but then I changed it into the nanopan.

And it'll be a range then.

It'll be a whole range.

Oh, yeah.

And all you've got to do between now and then, very simple just work out how to structure these objects down at the scale where light doesn't even have color

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I'm Matthew Side and Sideways, my podcast from BBC Radio 4, brings you stories of seeing the world differently.

From that moment on, I feel like my life and the way that I view life itself just shifted, literally.

Stories about the ideas that shape our lives.

If a missile had come down and killed us all, it wouldn't have mattered.

It was just me in a moment of bliss in the middle of a war zone.

Stories about everything from the ethics of using AI to simulate conversations with the dead to viewing decay as a vehicle for rebirth.

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