A scientific breakthrough, and recently published in Langmuir, has been led by Irish academic Joseph Mooney – a Sir Bernard Crossland Symposium scholar – at MIT and sheds light on a long-standing mystery in materials and environmental science.
Mooney is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at MIT and a graduate of the University of Limerick.
The study – 'In Situ X-ray Microscopy Unravelling the Onset of Salt Creeping at a Single-Crystal Level' – is the first to directly capture how salt crystals begin to grow and spread on surfaces beneath a droplet of liquid.
Using powerful real-time X-ray imaging at MIT.nano, we visualised a process known as salt creeping, revealing how a single crystal anchors to a surface and kicks off a cascading growth sequence.
"This work was carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during my time as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, and it was a collaboration between the University of Limerick, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Cornell University – with Ireland playing a central role in both the leadership and execution of the study," said Mooney.
Link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.langmuir.5c01460
Though subtle, this phenomenon has wide-reaching implications for global industries:
- Desalination and clean water technology;
- Mineral extraction and resource recovery;
- Separation science and filtration membranes;
- Anti-fouling coatings and corrosion prevention;
- Art and cultural heritage preservation.
"I hope that this might inspire other young people in college to aim high in academia. Funnily enough I'm using similar techniques that I pitched at the Symposium to find these phenomena," said Mooney.
