They’re too small for a centrifuge to remove. It leaves behind particles of oil about the size of bacterial cells. But this process doesn’t fully clean the water. Those companies use a type of centrifuge that spins the water until oil and dirt separate out. Laws and regulations require oil companies to partially clean up the water. That’s more than twice the amount of water used daily by the nearly 9 million people living in New York City. The oil industry creates 2.4 billion gallons of such oily water each day in the United States. This mechanical engineer works at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass.ĭrilling for oil and extracting it from the ground uses a lot of water - and leaves that water tainted with oil. Bart Lipkens is part of a team that has taken up the challenge. In fact, it’s hard to completely separate them. Despite the age-old saying, oil and water do mix. Separating oil from water is another potential use for this technology. For now, Urbansky is working on connecting the chip to a machine that would count white blood cells. The technique is still a ways off from being used outside of the lab. At its pace, it would take a chip more than four months to sort a liter of blood! Luckily, some possible uses, like counting white blood cells, require only a drop or two. The technique is useful only for separating small amounts of blood. “Just by having a difference in how much force is acting on them … we can separate them,” Urbansky explains. Having a different size and density, they stay along the sides. White blood cells are less affected by the sound. When red blood cells run through the chip, sound from the speaker ushers them down the middle. This chip sits on top of a tiny speaker, which provides the sound. (One microliter is about one-fiftieth the size of a water droplet.) To do this, she uses a silicon chip “about the size of a Kit-Kat ,” she says. Urbansky’s goal is to separate very small amounts of blood - just five microliters per minute - with sound. It also requires at least several drops of blood. But separating blood with a centrifuge takes time. White and red blood cells part ways because they have different densities. This machine rapidly spins blood samples until white blood cells separate from red ones. Finding the few white blood cells in the mix is like finding a needle in a haystack. “The problem is if you have a normal blood sample, you have billions of red blood cells,” Urbansky says. The more white blood cells someone has, the more likely they are to have an infection. Counting the cells is a good way to tell if someone is sick. They show up in large numbers to fight off germs. These cells are part of the immune system. Asier Marzo In the bloodĪt Lund University, Anke Urbanksy is part of a team that uses sound to move white blood cells. This do-it-yourself acoustic levitator kit can be assembled at home. Other scientists are finding even more practical uses for moving objects with sound. Marzo and his colleagues have even created a kit that lets people build their own acoustic levitator at home. How small? Each was a millimeter (0.03 inch) wide. By using so many, he can move and levitate up to 25 small objects at once. One of Marzo’s projects involved hundreds of tiny speakers. He builds acoustic levitators at the Public University of Navarre in Spain. This traps the objects in nodes where it’s quiet, explains engineer Asier Marzo. This will happen because the force of sound pushes objects from loud areas to quieter ones. Two German physicists, Karl Bücks and Hans Müller, placed droplets of alcohol at nodes they had created in their lab. In the early 1930s, scientists discovered they could use nodes to levitate objects. Points along a sound wave where the amplitude is always zero are called nodes. At that spot, the amplitude is zero, so there is no sound. When the crest of a wave lines up perfectly with the trough of another wave, the two waves cancel each other out.
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