"Mr. Boring Boron Boride" himself, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Michael Yeung, breaks down what makes a spicy molecule spicy and how his team found one that is just spicy enough to send rockets into space but not so spicy that it threatens to blow up the launch pad.
We asked Michael Yeung about his favorite bits of boron lore. He did not disappoint.
Even if the first one may be apocryphal, it would make a great techno spy thriller.
"There was an old story that I heard about how we had a spy in the Soviet Union who was monitoring their rocket launches, and how they noticed that all the rocket plumes were green. The CIA immediately concluded that the Soviet Union was making boron-based missiles to hit the U.S. (boron is one of the few elements that burn green), and got a lot of labs in the U.S. to work on boron chemistry because we didn't want to be outranged in the Cold War. Turned out in the end that the fuel that the Soviet Union was using was just contaminated by the OTHER element than burns green (copper), and that was what made the rocket plumes look green. It was great for universities, though!"
OK, but what does Chernobyl have to do with it?
"The reason why boron chemistry exists today is because of nuclear power. The U.S. was building a bunch of nuclear reactors during the Cold War, and so we made A LOT of boron (it absorbs neutrons and is used as a control rod to prevent reactors from melting down, i.e. Chernobyl, where the boron control rods got stuck). Because we made so much boron during the Cold War, the U.S. decided to ship the excess boron to research labs to see if they could make anything useful out of it, which was another reason why boron chemistry was really popular in the '60s. We're trying to make it hot again."
Learn more about how Michael's research group is blending traditional and advanced computational chemistry to unlock the spiciest traits of boron compounds.
Read their recent publication in the The Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Visit Yeung Lab @ UAlbany
Research and interview by Erin Frick
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman & Brian Busher
Photos by Brian Busher
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
0:01 Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications & Marketing.
For this episode, we sat down with Assistant Professor of Michael Yeung of the Department of Chemistry to talk about how spicy molecules can help us explore space.
Michael's research team recently created a new high-energy compound — manganese diboride — to make more powerful and efficient rocket fuels.
Yeah, I know that sounds complicated. But for this conversation, all you need to know about chemistry is this.
Manganese is a hard, brittle, silverish metal often used in alloys to strengthen steel or to make soft drink cans. Diboride means the compound also contains the element boron, which in some ways acts like a metal and in some ways doesn't. And together — well, when you put them together, things get interesting.
Michael explained what makes boron compounds so useful, and how manganese diboride is just spicy enough to send things hurtling into orbit. But not so spicy that it risks blowing up the launchpad. Here's Michael to explain it.
1:21: Michael Yeung
I affectionately refer to myself as Mr. Boring. Boron Boride because my group mostly works on boron chemistry. My group, we mostly work on boron-based compounds. This was based on us trying to build materials that were stronger, tougher, harder than diamond. Diamond we know from nature is the strongest material in existence. And as we were working on trying to discover all these new materials that are tougher, stronger than diamond — working on these diboride structures — we're like, “Well, this is interesting, but let's see if there are any other cool, interesting properties that we can come up with.” And so we started moving into other directions. Rocket fuel is just one aspect.
If you imagine, “What is the ideal rocket fuel?” there are like three parameters. The first is you want to have a very good energy per weight. If we're sending something to space, the lighter the rocket fuel is, the more stuff that we can put inside there. The second thing we want is more volume per energy, right? The more room that we have to put more astronauts, put other people — if we’re trying to explore Mars and we only send one guy to the planet, he's going to get very lonely very quickly. And I believe there's a movie about that with Matt Damon in it.
The last thing we want specifically for rocket fuel is safety, right? We want something that only burns whenever we want it to burn, and the case of manganese diboride, what my group and my students have done is that they have found a way to ensure that this material becomes unstable enough for it to go ahead and store massive amounts of energy while being stable enough so that it doesn't burn violently, uncontrollably. You want your rockets to launch when you want your rockets to launch, not five minutes before, not five minutes later — at exactly T-minus zero. That's when NASA wants to launch our rockets, and that's what our goal is.
Back in my day, we used to have the space shuttle, and on the side of the space shuttle there are these two solid state rocket boosters. And the fuel that powers those things is powdered aluminum metal. Our material is roughly about 25 percent more energy per weight compared to aluminum and 150 percent more compared per volume. And so this means that essentially you can save roughly about 2.5 times in terms of volume, and you can save a little bit more than 23 percent more when it comes to weight.
With rocket fuel, you want something that is, I like to say, spicy. You want something that has a little bit of — a little bit of fun associated with it. In particular with his compound, we want it to be just barely on the cusp of stability, right? It's the same way I like to describe food. The best tasting food that you eat is always going to be something spicy. You're sitting right there, you eat something, you're wondering if you're going to live or you're going to die afterwards. When it comes to boron compounds such as rocket fuels, they're just barely on the cusp of stability. They're stable enough that they will not burn unintentionally, but they're unstable enough to store energy. And that's where I like to go ahead and say, “That's where chemistry is.” This is why this lab is a spicy lab.
There are a lot of problems in this world, and if we can do anything to solve any of those problems, that's what we try to do.
4:26: Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
That was Assistant Professor of Chemistry Michael Yeung on how his lab is examining the potential of spicy compounds to power the next generation of space exploration — right here at the University at Albany.
To read Michael's favorite boron anecdotes — yes, there's more than one — or to learn more about how his colleagues are using powerful computers to make sense of these complex molecules, be sure to check out The Long(er) Version in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including for this episode research and writing by my colleague Erin Frick, who — although you didn't hear her voice — also interviewed Michael for today's podcast.
Scott Freedman and Brian Busher provided audio production and editing support from the UAlbany Digital Media Studio deep inside the Podium tunnels.
Thanks for taking a minute with us. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist here at the University at Albany. And this has been The Short Version.