 MaterialCards - Impulses & Inspiration
MaterialNews - Information & Innovation
Bristol University team dissolve iron in liquid surfactant to create a soap that can be controlled by magnets. The discovery, published today in Angewandte Chemie, could be used to create cleaning products that can be removed after application and used in the recovery of oil spills at sea.
Scientists from Bristol University have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap’s magnetic properties were proved with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin to result from tiny iron-rich clumps that sit within the watery solution. The generation of this property in a fully functional soap could calm concerns over the use of soaps in oil-spill clean ups and revolutionise industrial cleaning products ... more 
A team of UC Merced professors and students discovered that changing the shape of a solar concentrator significantly increases its efficiency, bringing its use closer to reality
A team of researchers at the University of California, Merced, has redesigned luminescent solar concentrators to be more efficient at sending sunlight to solar cells.
The advancement could be an important breakthrough for solar energy harvesting, said UC Merced physics Professor Sayantani Ghosh, who led the project.
"We tweaked the traditional flat design for luminescent solar concentrators and made them into cylinders," Ghosh said. "The results of this architectural redesign surprised ... more
MIT researchers find critical speed above which birds — and drones — are sure to crash.
The northern goshawk is one of nature’s diehard thrill-seekers. The formidable raptor preys on birds and small mammals, speeding through tree canopies and underbrush to catch its quarry. With reflexes that rival a fighter pilot’s, the goshawk zips through a forest at high speeds, constantly adjusting its flight path to keep from colliding with trees and other obstacles.
While speed is a goshawk’s greatest asset, researchers at MIT say the bird must observe a theoretical speed limit if it ... more
Computational Materials researchers at UC Santa Barbara use cutting-edge calculations to determine fundamental optical transparency limits in conducting oxide material tin oxide
Researchers in the Computational Materials Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have uncovered the fundamental limits on optical transparency in the class of materials known as transparent conducting oxides. Their discovery will support development of energy efficiency improvements for devices that depend on optoelectronic technology, such as light- emitting diodes and solar cells.
Transparent conducting oxides are used as transparent contacts in a wide range of optoelectronic ... more
University of Illinois researchers have shown that by tuning the properties of laser light illuminating arrays of metal nanoantennas, these nano-scale structures allow for dexterous optical tweezing as well as size-sorting of particles.
"Nanoantennas are extremely popular right now because they are really good at concentrating optical fields in small areas,” explained Kimani Toussaint, Jr., an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “In this work, we demonstrate for the first time the use of arrays of gold Bowtie Nanoantenna Arrays (BNAs) for multipurpose optical trapping and manipulation of submicrometer- to micrometer-sized objects. We think that this ... more
To better understand the fundamental behavior of molecules at surfaces, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are combining the powers of neutron scattering with chemical analysis.
Scientists have a fundamental interest in how molecules behave at solid surfaces because surface interactions influence chemistry, such as in materials for catalysis, drug delivery and carbon sequestration. Understanding these interactions allows researchers to tailor materials for a specific desirable outcome.
Michelle Kidder and A.C. Buchanan, physical organic chemists, and Ken Herwig, neutron scattering scientist, used neutron scattering to study the physical motion of a chemically attached ... more
KU Leuven researcher Ventsislav Valev and an international team of scientists have developed a new method for optical manipulation of matter at the nanoscale. Using ‘plasmonic hotspots’ – regions with electric current that heat up very locally – gold nanostructures can be melted and made to produce the smallest nanojets ever observed.
The tiny gold nanodroplets formed in the nanojets are perfectly spherical, which makes them interesting for applications in medicine.
The ‘backjet’ phenomenon on which the method turns can be compared to a pebble being dropped into water. Tightly focused ultrafast laser pulses carry sufficient energy to locally melt the surface of a gold film. When a laser pulse of light hits the film, a nanoscale backjet – a nanojet – of molten gold surges upward.
As the name suggests, nanojets on the ... more
In the super-small world of nanostructures, a team of polymer scientists and engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered how to make nano-scale repairs to a damaged surface equivalent to spot-filling a scratched car fender rather than re-surfacing the entire part.
The work builds on a theoretical prediction by chemical engineer and co-author Anna Balazs at the University of Pittsburgh.
Their discovery is reported this week in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology. The new technique has many practical implications, especially that repairing a damaged surface with this method would require significantly smaller amounts of material, avoiding the need to coat entire surfaces when only a tiny fraction is cracked, says team leader and UMass Amherst polymer ... more
University of Illinois materials scientists have developed a new reactive silver ink for printing high-performance electronics on ubiquitous, low-cost materials such as flexible plastic, paper or fabric substrates.
Jennifer Lewis, the Hans Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and graduate student S. Brett Walker described the new ink in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
“We are really excited about the wide applicability and excellent electrical properties of this new silver ink,” said Lewis, the director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the U. of I.
Electronics printed on low-cost, flexible materials hold promise for antennas, batteries, sensors ... more
Fuel consumption and emissions can be reduced with new technology
No less than one third of a car's fuel consumption is spent in overcoming friction, and this friction loss has a direct impact on both fuel consumption and emissions. However, new technology can reduce friction by anything from 10% to 80% in various components of a car, according to a joint study by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in USA. It should thus be possible to reduce car's fuel consumption and emissions by 18% within the next 5 to ... more
Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method for creating advanced nanomaterials that could lead to highly efficient refrigerators and cooling systems requiring no refrigerants and no moving parts.
The key ingredients for this innovation are a dash of nanoscale sulfur and a normal, everyday microwave oven.
At the heart of these solid-state cooling systems are thermoelectric materials, which can convert electricity into a range of different temperatures—from hot to cold. Thermoelectric refrigerators employing these principles have been available for more than 20 years, but they are still small and highly inefficient. This is largely because the materials used in current thermoelectric cooling ... more
|
Materialsgate Partner
New Books
Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA
Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA
|
