Not just good for making meringues, University of Bolton Professor, Jack Luo, has led a team to develop a revolutionary work on environmentally friendly dissolvable electronics using egg white protein, magnesium and tungsten.
Unlike conventional electronics that contribute to a growing amount of harmful waste, dissolvable devices are designed to be compatible with the environment and have many potential applications from medical implants to environmental pollution monitoring.
To explore these possibilities, scientists worldwide have been working with an array of natural materials to test how well they perform in electronic devices and whether they might cause side effects or damage when implanted in humans or in the environment.
‘The dissolvable electronic device is a type of non-volatile memory devices used to store and process information,’ said Professor Luo.
‘Memory devices are one of the building blocks for electronics with tens of billions of dollars market worldwide. The developed devices target medical implant application to implement monitoring of a person’s health conditions, recovery of an operation etc. Once the task is completed, it dissolves in the body without causing side effect.’
Professor Luo has been working with colleagues at Zhejiang University and Cavendish Laboratory to build on this work and develop a transient memory device. To enable this, researchers rapidly spun diluted egg albumin, the white part of an egg, on a silicon wafer to turn it into an ultra-thin film. Then they incorporated electrodes made out of magnesium and tungsten.
Testing showed that the device’s performance matched that of non-degradable memristors. Under dry conditions in the lab, the components worked reliably for more than three months. In water, the electrodes and egg albumen dissolved in two to ten hours in the lab. The rest of the chip took about three days to break down, leaving minimal residues behind.
Said Professor Luo: ‘We will continue the research to make the devices work better. Meanwhile we are working on other transitional electronic devices such as transistors, so that a whole transitional system can be developed.’
