The famous ‘unboil an egg’ machine has been used for another remarkable purpose. 

The vortex fluidic device (VFD) can already ‘unboil’ egg protein, but is now unravelling the mystery of incompatible fluids. 

Researchers say they can make some liquids mix that do not mix, and then unmix them.

After 10 years of research, the Flinders University team says it has found a way to use clean chemistry to unlock the mystery of ‘mixing immiscibles’.

“Mixing immiscible liquids is fundamentally important in process engineering and usually involves a lot of energy input and waste products,” says Professor Colin Raston, 2020 SA Scientist of the Year.

“We now demonstrate how this process, using a common solvent and water, can avoid the use of other substance for controlling reactions across immiscible liquids, making it cleaner and greener,” says the professor in clean technology.

“Using thin-film microfluidics in combination with high shear flow chemistry and high heat and mass transfer, the rapidly evolving VFD technology is overcoming the mixing limitations of traditional batch processing,” says co-author Matt Jellicoe, also from the Flinders Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

“We conducted over 100,000 experiments to establish how liquids mix and what their flow behaviours are at very small nano-metre dimensions,” adds co-author Aghil Igder, also from the Flinders Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

The team has also upsized the VFD machine on experimental biodegradable polymers to start making its organic substances and clean technologies available at scale to suit a range of industries.