Emily Chan
Mayonnaise isn’t just good for spreading onto your sandwiches. It can also be used to help physicists produce nuclear fusion, a reaction that powers stars like the sun. In a new study, scientists scooped the condiment into a machine with a churning wheel to test what conditions made it flow.
“We use mayonnaise because it behaves like a solid, but when subjected to a pressure gradient, it starts to flow,” Arindam Banerjee, the lead author of the study and a mechanical engineer at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said.
Undergoing such a process could help clarify the physics that occurs at high temperatures and pressures in nuclear fusion reactions without having to create those extreme conditions. So, what is nuclear fusion, anyway?
Nuclear fusion is a reaction that takes place when two or more light nuclei fuse to produce a heavier nucleus. As a result, a huge amount of power is generated. In theory, it could be the source of cleaner, greener energy on Earth that is nearly limitless — but only if the reaction can produce more energy than it requires to run.
According to NASA, nuclear fusion occurs at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit when the massive gravity of a star forces hydrogen atoms together. On Earth, that kind of crushing pressure does not exist, so fusion reactors must be manufactured and run at a rate that is 10 times hotter than the sun.
There are a couple of different ways to achieve nuclear fusion in a laboratory setting. One of the methods is to use a device known as a tokamak. It employs magnetic fields to control an internal plasma and prompt fusion reactions.
Another is called inertial confinement, which works by freezing pea-sized pellets of gas into metal capsules. The gas is usually a combination of heavy isotopes of hydrogen. Then, the pellets are blasted with lasers, heating the gas up to 400 million degrees Fahrenheit and transforming it into a plasma where fusion can occur.
However, the hydrogen gas expands and causes the metal to explode before a fusion reaction can be created. The explosion happens when the metal capsules become unstable and start to flow. Banerjee and his team realized that molten metal behaved similarly to mayonnaise at lower temperatures.
Mayonnaise is an emulsion of egg, oil, and an acid such as vinegar. It can be elastic, bouncing back when you push on it. It can also be plastic, which means it flows and doesn’t bounce back.
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