chemistry

The mere thought of barbecue’s smokey scents and intoxicating flavors is enough to get most mouths watering. Summer is here, and that means it is barbecue season for many people in the U.S. I am a chemist who studies compounds found in nature, and I am also a lover of food – including barbecue. Cooking on a grill may seem simple, but there is a lot of chemistry that sets barbecue apart from other cooking methods and results in such a delicious experience. Cooking over an open flame – whether from gas, wood or charcoal – allows you to use both radiant and conductive heat to cook food. Romary/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Cooking with fire First, it is important to define barbecue because the term can mean different things in different cultures or geographic locations. At its most basic, barb...

The big idea In my synthetic chemistry lab, we have worked out how to convert the red pigment in common bricks into a plastic that conducts electricity, and this process enabled us to turn bricks into electricity storage devices. These brick supercapacitors could be connected to solar panels to store rechargeable energy. Supercapacitors store electric charge, in contrast to batteries, which store chemical energy. Brick’s porous structure is ideal for storing energy because pores give brick more surface area than solid materials have, and the greater the surface area the more electricity a supercapacitor material can hold. Bricks are red because the clay they’re made from contains iron oxide, better known as rust, which is also important in our process. We fill the pores in bricks with an...

Tag: chemistry

The Chemistry Of Cooking Over An Open Flame – What Makes Smoky, Charred Barbecue Taste So Good?

Clever chemistry turns ordinary bricks into electricity storage devices