Bricks owe their red pigmentation to iron oxide, better known as rust, and this latent chemical composition was the basis for D'Arcy's method.
We ended up synthesizing, on the bricks, a polymer that conducts electricity and stores energy. The way that we did that was very simple: fill up the bricks with acid, he said. Those acids infiltrate the pores and convert this iron oxide in the brick into a chemical reactant that's actually very useful for the synthesis of plastic.
D'arcy and his colleagues placed a brick in an oven and pumped acid vapors in, dissolving the iron oxide at a molecular scale.
The second step is to flow a second gas to the brick, and that second gas is monomer vapor, the professor said.
