The researchers have developed a concept called ‘Universal Murray’s Law,’ which connects biological vascular structures with artificial materials.Researchers, led by the NanoEngineering Group at the Cambridge Graphene Centre, have found inspiration in the natural vein structure of leaves to design porous materials that enhance mass transfer.
“But whereas this traditional theory works for cylindrical pore structures, it often struggles for synthetic networks with diverse shapes – a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” said first author Binghan Zhou. “To broaden its applicability to synthetic materials, we expanded this Law by considering the flow resistance in hierarchical channels. Our proposed Universal Murray’s Law works for the pores of any shape and suits all common transfer types, including laminar flow, diffusion, and ionic migration,” he continued.