Throughout history humans have taken raw materials from the earth and turned them into useful tools. And as science has advanced, we now use these same types of materials in entirely different ways. From ancient times until now, ceramics have played a huge roll in society. Go to any natural history or art museum and you'll see. Early civilizations discovered when you take clay, sand, and water from the earth and apply heat, you can transform not just the materials, but societies too. >> Ceramics are one of the most ancient technologies of human history going back at least 20,000 years if not more. And one of the largest applications in ceramics is the production of tools used for processing, storing, and serving foods. So making ceramics was never really the end game in and of itself, it is a tool that's used for harnessing the energy potential of foods that were the economic foundation for civilization. >> But it's the Electrical, Optical, and Magnetic properties of ceramics that have made them so important to our high tech world. We all know ceramics break, but they can also convert energy from one form to another. What do I mean? >> Ceramics have an interesting property and that they can be very strong and compression, very weak in tension, but strong in compression. So ideally if you want to design a plate or a cup that doesn't break, then what you want to do is take advantage of that strength and compression. So that's what CorningWare did when they designed their plates. They took a green body or a clay ceramic that they used for the inner part that has a high thermal expansion coefficient, meaning it would contract a lot when you cool it down. And then they put a glass on the outside of it that have less of the thermal expansion coefficient. So as it's cooling down the outside doesn't wanna compress as much as the inside does, so the inside pulls it in to a state of compression, and that makes that outer coating very, very strong. So when you drop a CorningWare plate it actually tends to not break, and that's a real advantage if you're a consumer of these types of products. However, if you scratch or nick a CorningWare plate and then you drop it, well it could shatter into a million pieces. And what you're effectively doing is releasing all that stored mechanical strained energy inside the glaze. >> Well now we can tailor a material by intentionally combining different types of properties such as Thermal, Electrical, Magnetic, and Mechanical. And in some cases, we can even get coupling between these different properties. For example, in a new class of material referred to Magnetoelectrics, or Multiferroics, we can now use a Magnetic Field to control the electric properties of a material. In Thermoelectric materials for example, we can now use a Thermal Gradient to generate an electrical potential or to power a circuit. >> The thermoelectric material has this ability to convert a temperature difference into electrical energy. So what we have here is the device in which the thermoelectric material is sandwiched between these two metal probes, all right? So as I generate a temperature difference between these two, the electrical current that's being generated should run up and run through that motor. So in order to generate the temperature difference, I can either heat one side and keep the other at ambient temperature, or in this case, I'm gonna go ahead and cool one side and keep the other one at room temperature. So what I have here is some liquid nitrogen. So as I pour this in, the temperature difference should start to generate an electrical current, which will then make the fan blade run. And it takes a little while for that metal to cool down once I put it in there, so we'll let this thing slowly come down in temperature. And you could see this is filled with liquid nitrogen, so this is at 77 kelvin. This side over here is at three hundred kelvin which is room temperature. There it goes. So now what's happened is that this side has gotten cold enough relative to room temperature to generate the voltage that's necessary to actually run the fan. >> Have you ever used a gas grill? Well if so, you've probably used piezoelectric material without even knowing it. Piezoelectric materials are those that can convert a mechanical energy into an electrical energy. So for example, in your gas grill, you may push a button, that's your mechanical energy. That then leads to a voltage between these two wires that can cause the spark that leads to your gas grill lighting. >> The energy budgets of making ceramics increase as they become more specialized, as they become more widely applied in different applications. And the question then becomes can we actually achieve a return on that energy investment? What's really exciting about technical ceramics of the future, the ones that being developed today, is the capacity to extract the energy out of the ceramic that was put into it to manufacture it. And if that can be done with a sustainable budget, where the return is as good or better than the energy that went into it, that's really sustainable, and that's very exciting. >> Imagine a world where the foam in your running shoes did more than just cushion impact as you run. Imagine if instead it could absorb that mechanical energy and convert it into electricity. This is just one of the many future applications of piezoelectrics. >> My name is Carlos Rinaldi. I'm a professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering here at UF. My lab works with Magnetic Nanoparticles in general, suspensions of Magnetic Nanoparticles. In terms of functional ceramics, the idea here is that the materials are functional from the point of view of having a magnetic property that allows them to respond to an applied magnetic field in a certain way, either by rotating, translating, or dissipating energy. What I'm gonna illustrate here is the concept of Magnetic Buoyancy. And the idea here is that I have a Ferrofluid, in this case it's about ten nanometer particles in an oil based oil medium. And I have a little piece of plastic here and it's too dense, so it doesn't float, it sinks all the way to the bottom. And I'm gonna use a Rare Earth Permanent Magnet to generate a magnetic field, and what's gonna happen is that the magnet will attract the Ferrofluid towards it. And in doing so it'll displace the plastic, and therefore make it flow. And this is similar to the concept of buoyancy where the gravity and a liquid, let's say water, except that here instead of being mass that's relevant, what's relevant is the content of magnetic materials in the fluid. And so as I approach it you'll see that the plastic piece floats, and the actual position of the plastic piece depends on the relative positions of the Ferrofluid and the magnet. So a very simple and very exciting, I think, example of how this principle of magnetic buoyancy can be used in biomedicine is in separating Circulating Tumor Cells. So the idea here is that with very small concentrations, I mean really surprisingly small concentrations of magnetic nanoparticles in a liquid, you can generate a microfluidic device. You have a stream of cells coming in and you have an outlet, and then you use a magnet to push because of the magnetic buoyancy effect, push larger cells to come out another exit in the top. And so this takes advantage of the magnetic buoyancy effect that I've illustrated and also of the differences in the size of circulating tumor cells verses non cancer cells that are in the blood stream. So another application that we're developing is using magnetic nanoparticles, so magnetic microparticles for Biomarker scavenging as a way of detecting early stage Biomarkers for a virus. What we're trying to develop is an asset, if you will. A way of detecting and monitoring progression of the disease by monitoring expression of Biomarkers that are associated with the disease. >> So at the beginning of the video you saw Anena use her smart card in an ATM. Now the question you have to ask yourself is where's the ceramics implication in this thing, right? And so it turns out that a smart card uses what's called Ferroelectric RAM sometimes. Ferroelectric is a ceramic that has this unusual property in that you can store a polarization like a one or a zero with an electric field. And that means I can store in the ceramic, the information necessary to make that smart card work so it can tell you what your balance is when you log into the computer. We've gone from ancient ceramics that were just basically coffee cups and bath tubs, to modern ceramics, which have the ability to be multi-functional. So, they can actually transduce energy from one form to another. They can be Ferroelectrics, so they have the ability to store information like in your smart card. They can be Thermoelectrics, so they can convert waste heat into electricity and harness that in your car. They can be magnetic oxide particles that can be used for biological applications, such as separating cancer cells or detecting arthritic spinal markers in your bloodstream. So the opportunity for future ceramics is enormous, and it's just beginning to be tapped. >> So, ceramics have changed a lot over history, but now transforming them at the atomic scale has unleashed revolutionary new potential. What do you see as their ability to transform lives and society in the future?