Frederik Christiansen (24), Christian Breinholt (25), Kristian Hentze (22) and Frederik Randbøll Jørgensen (25) are in the fifth and seventh semesters of their
Design and Innovation programme. They have just spent three weeks experimenting with ways to use water and potato flour to reduce the braking distance of a car.
“We asked ourselves if it was possible to use what are known as ‘non-Newtonian’ fluids to minimize the number of tragic traffic accidents? These are fluids that solidify when subjected to violent force. We wondered whether it was possible to increase the braking coefficient of a car by injecting a fluid of this kind into the contact interface between road and tyre. This would boost the resistance to forward motion, and we can envisage this reducing the braking distance even more than ABS brakes already do.
Today, we are testing different braking distances using a car made of LEGO bricks and a non-Newtonian fluid we’ve made by mixing potato flour and water. It’s about a 50/50 mix, but with a little less water than flour, and it appears to have the consistency of icing. But if you smack something—like a marker pen—into it, you will notice that it quickly solidifies.
It seems counter-intuitive to use fluid to slow something down, as fluids are normally associated with lubrication. That’s why we think this is a really interesting project. The biggest hypothetical problem is how to spray the fluid onto the tyres, as this necessarily has to be done with a level of force that would make the fluid solidify ...”
DTUavisen no. 2, February 2015.