NEXT BIG THING: Fluid thinking saving the planet

The revolutionary vortex fluidic device (VFD) has the world of chemistry in a spin, writes COLIN RASTON

I wanted to make a difference and 25 years ago I completely embraced the concept of Green Chemistry. The idea says, “Let’s start all over again and make chemistry ‘benign by design’.”

As chemists, we can’t just keep doing more of the same without regard to the environment. Enough’s enough. And I think society finally gets it. Despite what some politicians were trying to tell us even a few years ago, climate change is real – it’s measurable. We’ve got bushfires and floods. And we’ve got plastics in the environment and in the oceans.

In chemistry, it’s gone from being almost like a moral obligation to go down that green path to a question of time before it’s a legal obligation.

The 12 Principles of Green Chemistry, laid out by Paul Anastas and John Warner, say that you don’t just tweak a process to make it cleaner, because you only get so far – you’re still going to generate waste if you use the same toxic reagents in your process.

Green Chemistry is not a band-aid approach. It’s making sure that we don’t create something that has a negative impact on the environment, and is sustainable. When it was first proposed, it was a paradigm shift, and as president of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, I helped get a lot of people involved. That ultimately led to securing the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Green Chemistry.

Globally, it’s now a big movement. These days, if you’re doing any kind of chemistry and applying to a funding agency, and you don’t take on board the principles of Green Chemistry, it’s highly unlikely you will get that funding.

Early in my research in Green Chemistry I was interested in applying these green concepts into continuous flow processing. It’s a no-brainer: if you’re doing your research and you pass some liquid through a reactor and it’s flowing through and flowing out, then you can do all the fundamental science, and guess what? Unlike batch processing, it’s got scalability already factored into it from the outset, so that the same research device can be your processing device. This way you can fast-track production, potentially bypassing the pilot stages that you’d normally have to do for conventional batch processing.

I was thinking about trying to make nanomaterials under continuous flow, and I wanted to do it by applying clean mechanical energy rather than adding any kind of auxiliary chemical. And that ultimately led to the design of the vortex fluidic device – the VFD. This is the device that won me and my colleagues the Ig Nobel Prize in 2015.

Understanding how fluids flow has been one of the great unsolved questions of science. Now, by understanding how liquids flow in our vortex fluidic device, simply by applying mechanical energy, we take a huge step forward. The application potential is immense...

For the full story on Professor Raston, un-boiled eggs and his ground-breaking vortex fluidic device, head below to Cosmos 97 | Energy. Effort. Endeavour