'Watermark İnk' Device İdentifies Unknown Liquids İnstantly

Materials scientists and applied physicists collaborating at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have invented a new device that can instantly identify an unknown liquid. The device, which fits in the palm of a hand and requires no power source, exploits the chemical and optical properties of precisely nanostructured materials to distinguish liquids by their surface tension.

The finding, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), offers a cheap, fast, and portable way to perform quality control tests anddiagnose liquid contaminants in the field.

"Digital encryption and sensors have become extremely sophisticated these days, but this is a tool that will work anywhere, without extra equipment, and with a verywide range of potential applications," says co-principal investigator Marko Lončar, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS.

Akin to the litmus paper used in chemistry labs around the world to detect the pH of a liquid, the new device changes color when it encounters a liquid with a particular surface tension. A single chip can react differently to a wide range of substances; it is also sensitive enough to distinguish between two very closely related liquids.

A hidden message can actually be "written" on a chip, revealing itself only when exposed to exactly the right substance. Dipped in another substance, the chip can display a different message altogether (see video).

"This highly selective wetting would be very difficult to achieve on a two-dimensional surface," explains lead author Ian B. Burgess, a doctoral candidate in Lončar's lab and in the Aizenberg Biomineralization and Biomimetics Lab. "The optical and fluidic properties we exploit here are unique to the 3D nanostructure of the material."

The "Watermark Ink," or "W-Ink," concept relies on a precisely fabricated material called an inverse opal. The inverse opal is a layered glass structure with an internal network of ordered, interconnected air pores.

Co-authors Lidiya Mishchenko (a graduate student at SEAS) and Benjamin D. Hatton (a research appointee at SEAS and a technology development fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard), recently perfected the production process of large-scale, highly ordered inverse opals.

"Two factors determine whether the color changes upon the introduction of a liquid: the surface chemistry and the degree of order in the pore structure," says Mishchenko, who works in the Aizenberg lab. "The more ordered the structure, the more control you can have over whether or not the liquid enters certain pores by just changing their surface chemistry."

Burgess and his colleagues discovered that selectively treating parts of the inverse opal with vaporized chemicals and oxygen plasma creates variations in the reactive properties of the pores and channels, letting certain liquids passthrough while excluding others.