A Kenyan professor, Martin Thuo, who teaches at Iowa State University in the US has been recognized and awarded for coming up with a game-changing formula to join two solid materials such as metal.
Interestingly, his incessant need to come up with a way to 'weld' metal together in a less noisy set up was inspired during a trip back to Kenya.
According to the Daily Nation, the professor was so irritated by the noise coming from welding works near a house during his visit back in 2011 that he focused solely on creating a system that allowed metals to be joined in silence.
“Someone was working on welding a gate and the noise coming from their work was just excruciating, especially after 20 hours of traveling and a late-night catching up with the family,” the chemistry expert told the Nation.
His lightbulb moment came in 2014 when he finally figured out how to carry out the process of joining two solids together without using any form of heat, and in an environment-friendly setting.
The professor and his team of 11 members came up with a formula that actually used cooling to fuse two surfaces together.
“The particles we made can be envisioned as balloons containing a liquid which when punctured release the liquid. But in our case, this also allows it to solidify,” the professor who obtained his master’s degrees in chemistry from Kenyatta University between 1996 and 2002 explained
“The question then was how we could keep the metal from becoming a solid once inside our shells. The solution was hidden in the shell itself since we could engineer it to keep the molten metal liquid even after cooling it below its melting point,” he added.
Details of the welding process were published in the Scientific Reports journal on February 16, 2016, where the innovative professor and his team explained the areas where their innovation can be used such as healing of damaged surfaces such as cracks or other defects as well as joining metals without requiring high tech instrumentation.
He has since launched his own start-up company - Safi Tech, which was granted Ksh10 million funding in the US on August 7, 2019.
Professor Thuo is the recipient of 2 grants, 4 patents, and 18 publications.
For his research, he has received various awards including the Mary-Fieser and the NSEC fellowships (Harvard University), the Lynn-aderson award for graduate research excellence (University of Iowa) and was an invited speaker (with travel award) to the 2012 International Conference for Young Researchers in Advanced Materials (ICYRAM) in Singapore
Thanks to the innovative Kenyan, scientists worldwide now know it is possible to join two solids without welding or using heat.
