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Prospective Energy Densities In The Forisome, A New Smart Material, William Pickard, Michael Knoblauch, Winfried Peters, Amy Shen
Prospective Energy Densities In The Forisome, A New Smart Material, William Pickard, Michael Knoblauch, Winfried Peters, Amy Shen
Winfried S. Peters
The forisome is a protein structure of plants which, in low Ca2+ solutions, assumes a crystalline condensed conformation and, at high Ca2+, swells to a dispersed conformation; this transition has been attributed to electrostatic deformation of protein “modules”. Forisomes could become an important smart material if the energy density of transformation approached 1 MJ m−3. Quantitation of the forisome as a charged porous continuum permeated by electrolyte fails by orders of magnitude to achieve this energy density electrostatically. However, condensed → dispersed transitions can be visualized alternatively: (i) an ionic bond near the surface of a forisome crystal dissolves to …