Material Science

By Mike Williams This could be where the rubber truly hits the road. Rice University scientists have optimized a process to convert waste from rubber tires into graphene that can, in turn, be used to strengthen concrete. The environmental benefits of adding graphene to concrete are clear, chemist James Tour said. “Concrete is the most-produced…

Materials science likes to take nature and the special properties of living beings that could potentially be transferred to materials as a model. A research team led by chemist Professor Andreas Walther of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has succeeded in endowing materials with a bioinspired property: Wafer-thin stiff nanopaper instantly becomes soft and elastic…

By Michael Langley Tim Briggs has built a career at Sandia National Laboratories tearing and breaking things apart with his team of collaborators. Now, he’s developed a fracture-testing tool that could help make everything from aircraft structural frames to cellphones stronger. Briggs has filed a patent for a device associated with bonded structural composite materials…

ACS Materials Letters Exposure to some odorless, colorless and tasteless gases, such as nerve agents, can be toxic or even lethal. And having the ability to detect other types of vapors could save people from eating spoiled or rotten food. Easy-to-use portable devices could, therefore, go a long way toward protecting the public. Now researchers…

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University (SBU) and other collaborating institutions have uncovered dynamic, atomic-level details of how an important platinum-based catalyst works in the water gas shift reaction. This reaction transforms carbon monoxide (CO) and water (H2O) into carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen gas (H2) — an…

RHOBARR 320 Polyolefin Dispersion, from the Dow Chemical Company, is a unique solution to the global problem of waste management and recycling for single-use paper articles. It provides comparable liquid and grease barrier to incumbent technology but at lower raw material use, resulting in finished articles that are compatible with existing paper recycling infrastructure. Further,…

In an exciting new advance, a team of scientists from Hiden Isochema in the UK and Cleveland State University in Ohio have developed a new way of analyzing materials for separating gases. Although gas separation using porous materials is an established technology, analytical techniques for assessing the performance of materials tend to be slow and…

DOWSIL EC-6601, from Dow Performance Silicones, provides a step-change in performance of electrically conductive adhesives, critical for emerging applications in autonomous driving, cameras and 5G base-station applications. It provides high elongation, superior shielding, strong adhesion, durability and conductive performance. Its unique siloxane matrix, enabled by Dow’s backward integration of raw materials, provides novel electrical and…

  Marking a major achievement in the field of spintronics, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Yale University have demonstrated the ability to control spin dynamics in magnetic materials by altering their thickness. The study, published today in Nature Materials, could lead to smaller, more energy-efficient electronic devices. “Instead…

ShAPE (Shear Assisted Processing and Extrusion), from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is a revolutionary new manufacturing process for a new generation of high-performance materials. Because ShAPE is radically different from conventional extrusion methods — eliminating the need for heating and melting to alloy and form metal products — it offers a scalable pathway to entirely…

A new carbon fiber material could bring cost and performance benefits to the wind industry if developed commercially, according to a study led by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories. Wind blades containing carbon fiber weigh 25% less than ones made from traditional fiberglass materials. That means carbon fiber blades could be longer than fiberglass ones…

The M2R2 CLLBC Multimode Radioisotope Identification Detector (RIID), from the Kromek Group, is the first product of its kind incorporating the dual-mode, gamma-neutron sensitive CLLBC crystal. This next-generation material, developed by RMD, previously won this award and this is the first instrument to move the technology from material to product. The M2R2 is an all-in-one,…

The animation depicts the controlled transport of a single molecule between two scanning tunneling microscope tips in an experiment at ORNL. Credit: Michelle Lehman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, contributed to a groundbreaking experiment published in Science that tracks the real-time transport of individual molecules.…

Nicca Chemical Co.’s NEOSEED NR-8800, silicone-based water repellent (DWR) for textiles, provides breakthrough performance as a sustainable, durable water repellent option in the textile market, which is moving away from Perfluoro chemicals (PFC). It is the first product on the market which embraces silicone technology as a main component resulting in a fine performance balancing…

By Stephanie G Seay, ORNL In the quest for advanced vehicles with higher energy efficiency and ultra-low emissions, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are accelerating a research engine that gives scientists and engineers an unprecedented view inside the atomic-level workings of combustion engines in real time. The new capability is an engine built specifically to…

Group14 Technologies, a global provider of silicon-carbon composite materials for lithium-ion markets, today announced it has secured $17 million in Series B funding led by SK Materials, a manufacturer of special gases and industrial gases, with participation from returning investor OVP Venture Partners. Group14 will use this operating capital to scale production to meet the…

Wouldn’t it be nice to have resins that can be tough, resilient and flexible all at the same time? That’s exactly the type of characteristics that ENGAGE Polyolefin Elastomers (POEs), from Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics, bring to the table. ENGAGE POEs serve as a bridge between rubber and plastic chemistries to inspire new design…

By Chris Cogswell, customer consultant and Kane Gu, product manager Elsevier When it comes to the materials we use in industry and daily life, we’re facing a range of new challenges — from shortages to environmental issues, to the need for new materials to support technology innovation. On top of this, consumer awareness is on…

401 Tech Bridge today announced Canapitsit Customs, Nautilus Defense and TxV Aerospace Composites as the winners of the Materials Innovation Challenge. 401 Tech Bridge will provide $105,000 ($35,000 per project) to the University of Rhode Island College of Engineering. Project funding will support collaboration with URI’s Dynamic Photomechanics Laboratory, led by Mechanical, Industrial and Systems…

In the ongoing quest to build a better battery, researchers used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to identify the potential of using polymer composites as electrode matrices to increase the capacity of rechargeable lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. “The composition of the adhesive and conductive framework for batteries hasn’t changed in years,”…

Binary Solvent Diffusion (BSD) enables the production of new materials with better performance and structure control while reducing costs, enhancing properties and allowing direct integration of devices. It represents a new paradigm for producing functionally designed supercrystals with significant flexibility in control of materials architecture and property as well as direct integration of nanoelectronic devices…

Ordinary metallic conductors have electrical resistance, which dissipates electrical power as heat when a current flows through them. Although resistance reduces slightly as the temperature is lowered, even at close to absolute zero there is significant resistance. When a superconductor is cooled, an abrupt change occurs at its critical temperature whereby all resistance suddenly disappears.…

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Although most of the planet is covered by water, only a fraction of it is clean enough for humans to use. Therefore, it is important to recycle this resource whenever possible. Current purification techniques cannot adequately handle the very hot wastewater generated by some industries. But now, researchers reporting in…

By Julie Chao Understanding how matter interacts with light – its optical properties – is critical in a myriad of energy and biomedical technologies, such as targeted drug delivery, quantum dots, fuel combustion and cracking of biomass. But calculating these properties is computationally intensive, and the inverse problem – designing a structure with desired optical…

 By Theresa Duque We rely on water to quench our thirst and to irrigate bountiful farmland. But what do you do when that once pristine water is polluted with wastewater from abandoned copper mines? A promising solution relies on materials that capture heavy metal atoms, such as copper ions, from wastewater through a separation process…