Some stains on your clothes are so stubborn that you often need to do the laundry at high temperatures. However, nanodiamonds could help loosen fat from surfaces even at or below room temperature, saving power in eco-friendly laundry cycles.

Britain's University of Warwick said in a statement on Tuesday that its researchers have discovered this useful function of nanodiamonds, which are tiny pieces of diamond less than ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair.

The problem is that even with modern biological washing powders, some fats and dirt on clothes cannot be removed at lower temperature, forcing consumers to wash the laundry at between 60 and 90 degrees centigrade.

"We found that the five-nanometre diamonds changed the way detergents behaved at 25 degrees centigrade, doubling the amount of fat removed when using one particular commercial detergent molecule," said Dr Andrew Marsh from the University of Warwick.

"Even at temperatures as low as 15 degrees centigrade, otherwise hard-to-remove fat could be solubilised from a test surface," he added.

Dr Marsh said the physical and chemical insight gained from nanodiamonds paves the way for future research to explore how this unique behavior might be exploited in other ways.

Findings of the research have been published in the journal, Applied Materials & Interfaces.