For years, green tea has been believed by some to lower cholesterol, prevent rheumatoid arthritis and even stave off cancer. Now scientists think the warm green stuff has yet another benefit: the potential to save hard-drive manufacturers millions of dollars.
A team of researchers based in Tucson, Arizona, announced Monday that a study of the use of green tea extracts for polishing the magnetic heads in hard-disk drives has yielded a compound that works three to four times faster than conventional compounds. If the findings can be reproduced in an industrial setting, the compound could reduce the cost and environmental impact of hard-drive manufacturing, the researchers said.
The study was funded by a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded under its Small Business Innovation Research program.[..]
"It's an exciting new area of chemistry," said John Lombardi, lead researcher on the project and president of Ventana Research. "Our original drive was to develop a (polishing) fluid that was biodegradable. But as we got deeper into developing the compound, one thing we discovered is that it could increase the efficiency of the magnetic read-write manufacturing process."[...]
The next step for the researchers is to quantify the environmental impact of the green tea compound in relation to other slurries and to develop it for commercial use, said Raghavan.
