Surface-bound self-assembled lipid nanotubes (LNTs) made of 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphoethanolamine (DOPE) were used to visualize the contractile activity of spreading cells. The interaction of cells with LNTs resulted in the nucleation of new nanotubes, directed toward the cell center, from existing ones. This process depended on cell generated forces and required acto-myosin mediated contractility. The dynamics of de novo generation of LNTs upon cell spreading was captured using optical microscopy on fluorescently labeled nanotubes and revealed characteristic fingerprints for different cell types such as fibroblasts, endothelial and melanoma cells. Additionally, the method was applied to detect the effect of a specific inhibitor on the generation of cellular forces. The mechanism of the LNT–cell interaction and the potential applications are discussed.

Nanofluids have been proposed to improve the performance of microchannel heat sinks. In this paper, we present a systematic characterization of aqueous silica nanoparticle suspensions with concentrations up to 31  vol %. We determined the particle morphology by transmission electron microscope imaging and its dispersion status by dynamic light scattering measurements. The thermophysical properties of the fluids, namely, their specific heat, density, thermal conductivity, and dynamic viscosity were experimentally measured. We fabricated microchannel heat sinks with three different channel widths and characterized their thermal performance as a function of volumetric flow rate for silica nanofluids at concentrations by volume of 0%, 5%, 16%, and 31%. The Nusselt number was extracted from the experimental results and compared with the theoretical predictions considering the change of fluids bulk properties. We demonstrated a deviation of less than 10% between the experiments and the predictions. Hence, standard correlations can be used to estimate the convective heat transfer of nanofluids. In addition, we applied a one-dimensional model of the heat sink, validated by the experiments. We predicted the potential of nanofluids to increase the performance of microchannel heat sinks. To this end, we varied the individual thermophysical properties of the coolant and studied their impact on the heat sink performance. We demonstrated that the relative thermal conductivity enhancement must be larger than the relative viscosity increase in order to gain a sizeable performance benefit. Furthermore, we showed that it would be preferable to increase the volumetric heat capacity of the fluid instead of increasing its thermal conductivity.

Nanofluids (colloidal suspensions of nanoparticles) have been reported to display significantly enhanced thermal conductivities relative to those of conventional heat transfer fluids, also at low concentrations well below 1% per volume (Putnam, S. A., et at. J. Appl. Phys. 2006, 99, 084308; Liu, M.-S. L., et al. Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer. 2006, 49; Patel, H. E., et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 2003, 83, 2931−2933). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the particle size, concentration, stabilization method and particle clustering on the thermal conductivity of gold nanofluids. We synthesized spherical gold nanoparticles of different size (from 2 to 45 nm) and prepared stable gold colloids in the range of volume fraction of 0.00025−1%. The colloids were inspected by UV−visible spectroscopy, transmission electron microscope (TEM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS). The thermal conductivity has been measured by the transient hot-wire method (THW) and the steady state parallel plate method (GAP method). Despite a significant search in parameter space no significant anomalous enhancement of thermal conductivity was observed. The highest enhancement in thermal conductivity is 1.4% for 40 nm sized gold particles stabilized by EGMUDE (triethyleneglycolmono-11-mercaptoundecylether) and suspended in water with a particle-concentration of 0.11 vol%.