Dec 1, 2011
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| Credit: Warwick University |
One of the first tasks for Warwick’s new £1.3 million supercomputer is to use its monster megabytes to analyse the natural properties of the tiny mollusc shell.
The humble mollusc shell is made up of only one mineral: calcium carbonate, yet the combination of that plus other enzymes and proteins give it remarkable properties in terms of strength while remaining incredibly light.
By modelling the process of its construction on the computer, scientists from the University of Warwick are hoping to guide future development of materials which replicate these natural properties in a synthetic format. It could revolutionise building materials in the future and even improve synthetic bone substitutes for use in operations such as hip replacements.
In their quest to fathom out how to mimic mother nature, mathematicians, physicists, chemists and biologists are using the enormous capacity of the super computer to run models and analysis which is speeding up their research considerably.
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