If you’ve ever soldered or welded, you’ll know that things get pretty hot. MesoGlue intends to fix that. It’s a room-temperature metallic glue that lets you stick parts together with reckless abandon and electrical control. The most interesting part of the entire system is that it allows us to solder parts onto boards without heat which will lead to press-fit electronics which, in short, is an amazing development. 
 
 These sorts of things are still fairly uncommon and the fact that it works at all should do much to improve the growth of DIY electronics and even reduce the energy needed to solder PCBs en massed. The MesoGlue Silver looks and acts like regular silver solder and you can even use the glue to attach chips to heatsinks permanently without thermal paste, a boon for high-performance computing folks. It’s a really cool technology that may change the way we make electronics. 
 
 Founded by Prof. Hanchen Huang and Paul Elliott of Northeastern University along with Prof. Stephen Stagon of the University of North Florida, the company is still in its early stages but should be ready to rock and roll soon. 
 
 “Both ‘metal’ and ‘glue’ are familiar terms to most people, but their com­bi­na­tion is new and made pos­sible by unique prop­er­ties of metallic nanorods–infinitesimally small rods with metal cores that we have coated with the ele­ment indium on one side and galium on the other. These coated rods are arranged along a sub­strate like angled teeth on a comb: There is a bottom ‘comb’ and a top ‘comb.'” said Huang. “We then inter­lace the ‘teeth.’ When indium and gallium touch each other, they form a liquid. The metal core of the rods acts to turn that liquid into a solid. The resulting glue pro­vides the strength and thermal/electrical con­duc­tance of a metal bond. We recently received a new pro­vi­sional patent for this devel­op­ment through North­eastern University.” 
 
 “The metallic glue has mul­tiple appli­ca­tions, many of them in the elec­tronics industry. As a heat con­ductor, it may replace the thermal grease cur­rently being used, and as an elec­trical con­ductor, it may replace today’s sol­ders. Par­tic­ular prod­ucts include solar cells, pipe fit­tings, and com­po­nents for com­puters and mobile devices,” he said. 
 
 It it saves me from burning my little fingers while making an electronic clock, I’m all in. 

 Welding and soldering form strong bonds that conduct electricity and heat, but they require high temperatures that can be dangerous to both people and equipment. A new company called MesoGlue claims that its eponymous metallic glue has all the advantages of welding and soldering but with the ease of use of polymer adhesives. 
 
 Image from Advanced Materials & Processes, January 2016 (pdf) 
 
 MesoGlue is made of metallic nanorods that are spaced just right such that a pair of coatings can lock into each other. It has two types: one made of silver and another made of copper “with other metals.” The latter can fuse objects together with very little pressure, like ordinary glues. The silver MesoGlue on the other hand needs a higher pressure to fuse without gaps, but the resulting bond has a higher electrical and thermal conductivity than the copper alloy MesoGlue. 
 
 I know that the concept of nanomaterials is hard to grasp, but that intro video is oversimplified and didn’t show the product itself. It doesn’t help that the company has no other demo videos as of this writing. That said, MesoGlue says it’s willing to demonstrate its wonder glue and join nearly any flat surface, but only at their facility. 
 
 [via Northeastern University via Motherboard] 

 Northeastern's Hanchen Huang and colleagues, experts in nanotechnology, have developed a glue that binds metal to metal to glass to you-name-it, sets at room temperature, and requires little pressure to seal 
 
 Per­haps no startup was launched for a more intriguing reason than that of Northeastern's Hanchen Huang. From the com­pany website: 
 
 "MesoGlue was founded by Huang and two of his PhD stu­dents: They had a dream of a better way of sticking things together." 
 
 Those "things" are every­thing from a computer's cen­tral pro­cessing unit and a printed cir­cuit board to the glass and metal fil­a­ment in a light bulb. The "way" of attaching them is, aston­ish­ingly, a glue made out of metal that sets at room tem­per­a­ture and requires very little pres­sure to seal. "It's like welding or sol­dering but without the heat," says Huang, who is pro­fessor and chair in the Depart­ment of Mechan­ical and Indus­trial Engineering. 
 
 In a new paper, pub­lished in the Jan­uary issue of Advanced Mate­rials & Processes, Huang and col­leagues, including North­eastern doc­toral stu­dent Paul Elliott, describe their latest advances in the glue's devel­op­ment. Our curiosity was piqued: Sol­dering with no heat? We asked Huang to elaborate. 
 
 On new devel­op­ments in the com­po­si­tion of the metallic glue: 
 
 "Both 'metal' and 'glue' are familiar terms to most people, but their com­bi­na­tion is new and made pos­sible by unique prop­er­ties of metallic nanorods--infinitesimally small rods with metal cores that we have coated with the ele­ment indium on one side and galium on the other. These coated rods are arranged along a sub­strate like angled teeth on a comb: There is a bottom 'comb' and a top 'comb.' We then inter­lace the 'teeth.' When indium and galium touch each other, they form a liquid. The metal core of the rods acts to turn that liquid into a solid. The resulting glue pro­vides the strength and thermal/?electrical con­duc­tance of a metal bond. We recently received a new pro­vi­sional patent for this devel­op­ment through North­eastern University." 
 
 On the spe­cial prop­er­ties of the metallic glue: 
 
 "The stan­dard polymer glue does not func­tion at high tem­per­a­tures or high pres­sures, but the metallic glue does. The stan­dard glue is not a great con­ductor of heat and/?or elec­tricity, but the metallic glue is. Fur­ther­more, the stan­dard glue is not very resis­tant to air or gas leaks, but the metallic glue is. 
 
 "'Hot' processes like sol­dering and welding can result in metallic con­nec­tions that are sim­ilar to those pro­duced with the metallic glue, but they cost much more. In addi­tion, the high tem­per­a­ture nec­es­sary for these processes has dele­te­rious effects on neigh­boring com­po­nents, such as junc­tions in semi­con­ductor devices. Such effects can speed up failure and not only increase cost but also prove dan­gerous to users." 
 
 What are some appli­ca­tions of the technology? 
 
 "The metallic glue has mul­tiple appli­ca­tions, many of them in the elec­tronics industry. As a heat con­ductor, it may replace the thermal grease cur­rently being used, and as an elec­trical con­ductor, it may replace today's sol­ders. Par­tic­ular prod­ucts include solar cells, pipe fit­tings, and com­po­nents for com­puters and mobile devices." 
 
 ### 

 If you want to piss off an electrical engineer, tell them that future electronics might be built using a room-temperature metallic glue instead of conventional soldering techniques. Despite the tedium, burns, bad joins, and dangerous lead fumes, soldering is a prized and hard-fought skill. It's also unavoidable: a technique central to absolutely everything to do with building and repairing electronics at all levels. 
 
 Materials scientists at Northeastern University in Boston are daring to suggest, however, that its days may be numbered. This is thanks to a recent creation dubbed MesoGlue: a "revolutionary joining solution that lets you attach items together with a metal bond, at room temperature." Soldering without the heat, in other words. The new material is described in this month's Advanced Materials and Processes. 
 
 The origins of soldering are usually put at around 5,000 BC. Metalworking had already been around then for 7,000 years or so, but the idea of using molten metal to join stuff together came later with the discovery of naturally occurring alloys featuring lower melting points. Earlier solders were made of gold and tin, with the tin-lead combination employed in contemporary electronics appearing some time during the Roman empire. In other words, soldering is old as hell. 
 
 MesoGlue is by contrast a relatively high-tech material, with its adhesive properties made possible thanks to engineered nanorods that act to "lock" together two surfaces in a similar way to two combs meshing together, but a lot more permanent. "When the mating surfaces are brought together, the large spacing of the nanorods allows them to slide between those on the opposing surface and to interpenetrate," the current paper explains. 
 
 The nanorods are encased by a shell that liquefies as it they interlock with the nanorods of the other surface to be bonded. The result is a liquid alloy that squishes around the interlocked nanorods, soon solidifying into a strong bond featuring the crucial ability to withstand high temperatures (as might be found in electronic componentry). 
 
 "When indium and galium touch each other, they form a liquid," explains Northeastern's Hanchen Huang in a Q&A. "The metal core of the rods acts to turn that liquid into a solid. The resulting glue pro­vides the strength and thermal/?electrical con­duc­tance of a metal bond." 
 
 
 
 Image: Huang et al 
 
 As the paper explains, the need for extreme temperatures in the conventional soldering process is more than just a danger to the fingers of a wayward Arduino hacker—it's a danger to the electronics themselves. While good connections are necessary to dissipate heat from CPU, the process of soldering the connections carries its own thermal dangers. 
 
 "As component size decreases, soldering or wire bonding becomes more challenging and voids can lead to joint failure," the Northeastern group writes. "A metallic glue bond eliminates the possibility of heat damage during attachment and simplifies the soldering process to merely pressing parts together to attach." 
 
 What's more, the researchers found that their metallic glue dissipated heat even more efficiently than the thermal grease usually used to pack the spaces between electronic components and nearby heat sinks, with simulations showing CPU temperatures of around 8 degrees Celsius lower on average. 
 
 Naturally, the scientists have already patented MesoGlue. But good old lead remains as cheap as ever. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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– The end of good old soldering? Researchers at Northeastern University say they've created a metallic glue that gets the same job done at room temperature. If MesoGlue works up to expectations, it "may change the way we make electronics," reports TechCrunch. Soldering—heating metal into molten form and using it to make things stick together—has been around thousands of years, notes a post at Motherboard. But it's painstaking, and the heat involved is a hazard both to hobbyists' fingers and to the electronics themselves. The new high-tech glue makes use of research into nanorods, "infinitesimally small rods with metal cores," the researchers explain in a post at Eureka Alert. One side of the rod is coated with the element indium, the other with galium. "These coated rods are arranged along a sub­strate like angled teeth on a comb: There is a bottom ‘comb’ and a top ‘comb,'” writes Northeastern's Hanchen Huang. “We then inter­lace the ‘teeth.’" The two elements form a liquid when they touch, and "the resulting glue pro­vides the strength and thermal/electrical con­duc­tance of a metal bond." Put more simply: "It's like welding or soldering without the heat." But don't write off soldering just yet. A blog post at Technabob cautions that the one demo video currently available for MesoGlue is "oversimplified," and Motherboard notes that "lead remains as cheap as ever." No word yet on when the patented MesoGlue might hit the market.