Whiter than white
In the 1951 Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit, nerdy scientist Sidney Stratton, played by Alec Guinness, invents a miraculous fabric that never gets dirty and never wears out. Almost seventy years later, a German company called Nanopool says it has done effectively the same thing
In the 1951 Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit, nerdy scientist Sidney Stratton, played by Alec Guinness, invents a miraculous fabric that never gets dirty and never wears out. Almost seventy years later, a German company called Nanopool says it has done effectively the same thing
Instead of inventing an indestructible fabric, Nanopool has come up with a way of coating any material in an invisibly thin layer of transparent liquid glass. This flexible, breathable shield, approximately 100 nanometres thick (500 times thinner than a human hair), is food safe, environmentally friendly, and can be applied to almost any surface within seconds.
Houses, cars, ovens, a wedding dress or any other protected surface becomes stain resistant and can be easily cleaned with water – no cleaning chemicals are required. The coating is now also recognised as being suitable for agricultural application, the company says. Vines coated with the liquid glass, for example, don’t suffer from mildew; coated seeds grow more rapidly without the need for anti-fungal chemicals.
Neil McClelland, the UK project manager for Nanopool, says experiments are underway that use the coating inside the human body, with results that he says are “stunning”. Items such as stents, used to ease the flow of blood through clogged arteries, can be coated in the material, making them less susceptible to blockage. “Catheters and sutures, which are a source of infection, will also cease to be problematic,” he says.
The technology works by extracting molecules of SiO2 – the primary constituent of glass – from quartz sand and then adding the molecules to water or ethanol. “The really clever part is that there are no added nano∞particles, resins or additives – the coatings form and bond due to quantum forces,” says McClelland.
The technology is already available for domestic use in Germany and will be on sale for retail use in the UK this summer. “Very soon almost every product that you purchase will be protected with some form of easy-to-clean coating,” he says. “It just so happens that we offer something that everyone finds fascinating. The concept of spray-on glass is just mind-boggling”.
Sidney Stratton had less success with his invention. Realising an indestructible material would be bad for business, clothing companies and staff unions tried to suppress his invention. When they failed, they chased him down the street and ripped his suit to shreds. Let’s see whether Nanopool has more luck.
