Living in a material world

Imagine the situation: you're a chemist, trying hard every day to make a
new material. Maybe you add something different to your reaction
ingredients, or maybe you just heat them for a bit longer, or to a higher
temperature than normal. How do you know whether you've succeeded,
and made something never seen before? Your reaction product might end
up a different colour, or be a bit smellier, but it also might not. People are
known for getting salt and sugar confused in their own kitchens, so you
can't rely on your eyes alone. There are many different methods that
chemists use to characterise a material, finding out whether it could be the
next big thing.
Taking a closer look
First you might start off by using a more powerful set of eyes: the field of
microscopy extends far beyond the optical microscopes you could use to
look at leaves or bugs on a glass slide. Using an optical microscope, you
are limited by the wavelength of the photon of light that you are using to
see your material. An electron has a wavelength of up to 100,000 shorter
than that of a visible light photon, and so if you use electrons you can see
even smaller, revealing changes in material you hadn't been able to see
before.
High resolution images produced in this way have been used in graphene
research to check to see if there are defects in the graphene layer.
What's it made of?
If just looking at the outside of your material doesn't hold any clues, then
you could try and have a peek at what's inside. You might think that
because you know what ingredients you put into your reaction mixture, that
you know what has come out at the end, but that's not always the case.
Gases can easily boil off, and so it's a good idea to check what elements
are present in your product. There are lots of techniques that will help you
find the chemical composition of your product.
Mass spectrometry involves firing electrons at your material in order to
break it up into its constituent parts that are positively charged. These
fragments are then ordered by weight, usually using a magnetic field. They
are then detected and the results you'll see will be all the elements that
make up your material .These act as a fingerprint for your substance, and
this technique is used in airport security locations to test for the fingerprints
of drugs or explosives.
Infrared radiation can also be used to investigate how the atoms in your
material are bonded together. Some chemical bonds will absorb infrared
radiation, causing them to vibrate. It is this absorption that causes the
greenhouse effect, as the bond between carbon and oxygen in carbon
dioxide has this property. Using this technique will be able to give you
information about, for example, whether the nitrogen atoms in your material
are bonded to oxygen or hydrogen.
Same thing, different structure?
Sometimes you might have two materials that have the same chemical
composition, but where the atoms inside them have arranged themselves
differently. In this case, you need to investigate the crystal structure to be
able to tell the difference between them. In the same way that you can look
at your own internal bone structure by using X-rays, materials chemists use
X-ray diffraction to look at the structure of crystals. A material is crystalline
if the atoms that make it up are arranged in a regular, repeating pattern.
The whole material can then be described by repeating one small section
of it over and over again, in all directions.
When X-ray radiation is shone on a sample, the waves that make up the
radiation are scattered by the atoms in the crystal. The waves scattered by
different layers of the crystal interact, and produce a pattern on the
detector. X-rays are used because their wavelength is a similar size to the
distance between crystal layers. This technique is particularly useful when
investigating the arrangement of atoms in minerals and metals.
It was used by the Mars rover Curiosity to find minerals in the Martian soil
that are also present near volcanoes in Hawaii.
What does it do?
OK, so you've made your material, and it looks, feels, and smells different
to anything you've seen before. But how does it behave? The discovery is
only the first step - then you have to find out what it does.
Lots of mechanical testing is how you would imagine it: you find out how
hard something is by hitting it; how soft it is by squeezing it; and how bendy
it is by trying to bend it! Chemically, the techniques are similar too. You can
monitor the weight of your material whilst you heat it up, measuring what
gases are given off and when. This will give you an indication as to how
stable it is at high temperature. You could also try putting the gas back in,
and see if the material regains the weight it lost. This could be useful for
storing carbon dioxide, or hydrogen. You might try finding out if the material
can conduct electricity, or ions. Maybe your new material will be inside
every smartphone battery within a few years.
Many of these tests take a long time. You will need to find out how your
material behaves over multiple uses, whether it starts to break, or
decompose.
What next?
Development of these different characterisation techniques has
revolutionised the world of materials chemistry. Being able to gain an
insight into the chemical make-up and structure gives you a clue as to what
it is about a material that makes it behave how it does. This focuses your
research on improving those properties, and lets you know when you're on
track for something promising. So with these techniques becoming more
widespread and giving even more detailed insights - surely it's only a
matter of time before the next big breakthrough?