Material Science

How facility design, containment, and cleaning validation decisions determine commercial yield and time-to-market. Scaling spray drying from lab success to commercial production is one of the most complex transitions in pharmaceutical manufacturing. While early-stage results may appear promising, many organizations underestimate how facility design, safety systems, and day-to-day operations affect performance at scale. These oversights…

Atomis, a Japanese startup advised by 2025 Nobel laureate Susumu Kitagawa, is bringing Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) to applications such as CO2 capture, refrigerant recycling and next-generation deodorization and coatings. One tool they are using to accomplish this is an AI-powered simulation platform from Matlantis.  MOFs have struggled to move beyond the lab due to…

At Sandia National Laboratories, inspecting ceramic components destined for nuclear deterrence applications traditionally meant lots of manual work. Inspectors would sit at a microscope for up to an hour per part where they would scan every surface for hairline cracks, chips and voids that could compromise performance. Training a single operator on the manual process…

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed an AI agent, LLMB, designed to accelerate the development-validation cycle of lithium metal batteries (LMBs). They published their work in ACS Central Science, and the agent is available in a GitHub repository. LLMB integrates a large language model for hierarchical text mining with…

Researchers have developed a metal-organic material (MOM) that can capture water from the air. They published their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Materials like this could be critical to combating global water scarcity, the paper stated.  According to the United Nations, water stress levels reached 18.6% in 2021, rising 2.8% globally…

Ryan Davis and Nathan Bays, scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, set out to find a better way to absorb and degrade per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water sources, but quickly discovered that detecting the chemicals in the water took too long. They pivoted and have developed a faster, cheaper way to test for PFAS…

High-entropy alloys have long looked promising as catalysts because combining five or more metals can create unusually rich reactive surfaces. But researchers have struggled to control the nanoscale surface structures that shape how those particles perform. Now, a Northwestern team reports a three-step synthesis that controls both composition and surface facets in HEA nanoparticles. Applied…

Atomistic simulation, which has long been a differentiator for well-resourced R&D organizations, is having a cloud moment. High-fidelity methods are computationally demanding, and that cost has shaped where and how teams deploy them. Even density functional theory (DFT), the workhorse of computational chemistry, does not escape this reality: many implementations scale roughly as the cube…

Liquid metals (LMs) have a unique combination of properties that suit the extreme environment of space, such as wide liquid-temperature ranges, high thermal and electrical conductivity, low vapor pressure, large surface tension and responsiveness to electric and magnetic fields. Gallium and bismuth-based alloys are often highlighted as the most promising candidates due to their chemical…

Bioengineers have successfully utilized AI-driven protein modeling to reconstruct Type I collagen from the Tyrannosaurus rex genome.  Scientists and designers unveiled the world’s first handbag made from T-Rex Leather last week. The leather was engineered using reconstructed dinosaur collagen. The handbag will be on display beside a life-sized T. rex statue in Amsterdam.  VML, a…

Sodium-ion batteries enter mass production. Calcium-ion cells clear 1,000 cycles. And a counterintuitive discovery at Surrey challenges decades of battery-chemistry orthodoxy. On February 5, 2026, CATL and Changan Automobile unveiled what CATL called the world’s first mass-production passenger vehicle equipped with sodium-ion batteries. The vehicle, powered by CATL’s Naxtra cells at an energy density of…

Researchers at the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) have developed a ceramic membrane manufacturing process that operates effectively at 2 bar, five times lower pressure than conventional nanofiltration systems, while achieving 99.8% dye removal with selective salt permeability. This technology combines novel mutual doping and co-sintering techniques to address the limitations of conventional water-treatment…

A research team at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics has developed aluminum tubes that will not sink, even when damaged, using a technique learned from observing spiders. Their work was published in Advanced Functional Materials.  The team created buoyancy by chemically etching micro- and nanoscale pits into the aluminum tubes to capture air,…

When Hau Nguyen describes the moment she knew her idea would work, she does not sound like someone guessing. She remembers a simple plate in the lab that made everything click. “That’s when I knew, yeah, this is going to work,” she says, describing the clear circles that showed her enzyme was degrading an opaque…

Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories are investigating methods to capture methane from biogas, a mixture found in waste such as food scraps, manure and sewage. Biogas is a renewable energy source produced by breaking down organic matter that can be used to fuel vehicles, heat homes and generate electricity.  “We are creating new types of…

Researchers in the Netherlands, Italy and Poland have developed a new porous material that can selectively capture carbon dioxide and release it in response to visible light. Their work was published in PNAS last month.  The work combines porous framework materials and light-responsive functional groups. Ben Feringa, who shared the 2016 chemistry Nobel Prize, and…

At the 2025 R&D 100 Awards in Scottsdale, Arizona, we caught up with the National Energy Technology Laboratory team behind PLUS-Graphite. The technology converts polyethylene waste into high-performance synthetic graphite for lithium-ion batteries. Dr. Pangjali Mule, Ashra and Shinway represented NETL on the red carpet, where they reflected on what winning the “Oscar of Innovation”…

What if discarded fishing nets could become medical-grade materials? Taiwan Textile Research Institute’s Looping Nylon Technique does exactly that, transforming marine waste into high-performance nylon membranes without virgin feedstock or chemical adhesives. The technique uses ultrasonic cleaning combined with a patented chain extension and polyether modification process to purify recycled fishnets to roughly 98% purity.…

Qnity’s UV 26GNF photoresist took home a 2025 R&D 100 Award in the Mechanical/Materials category for delivering what the semiconductor industry thought was still years away: a non-fluorine lithography material that actually improves performance. In this interview, Randal King, Qnity’s Chief Technology and Sustainability Officer, explains how a team of about 30 scientists accomplished in…

DuPont took home three 2025 R&D 100 Awards in the Mechanical/Materials category, one of the strongest showings for a commercial entity at the gala. At the awards ceremony, R&D World caught up with Khyati Vyas (technical lead, Tychem Garments), Allie Fletcher (end-use marketing lead, DuPont Personal Protection) and Caleb Funk (R&D laureate, DuPont Water Solutions)…

DuPont’s Tychem 6000 SFR garment (pictured) earned an R&D 100 Award for solving a longstanding trade-off in protective clothing: chemical resistance versus flame protection. Previously, workers in oil and gas, petrochemical and chemical manufacturing had to choose one or the other, or layer garments and deal with significant heat stress. The Tychem 6000 SFR provides…

Hip fractures remain one of the most serious consequences of falls among older adults, often triggering a cascade of mobility loss and health complications. Researchers at Hong Kong’s Nano and Advanced Materials Institute (NAMI) developed NuHip to address both the protection gap and the comfort barriers that have limited adoption of traditional hip protectors. NuHip…

Tata Steel’s 2025 R&D 100 recognition spotlights a materials and infrastructure problem at the center of the emerging hydrogen economy: how to move hydrogen safely over long distances. In an interview, Prashant Pathak, Ph.D., explains that the status quo is constrained by hydrogen embrittlement, where steel exposed to hydrogen can suffer degraded properties, including fracture…

Rare earths are everywhere in the news. The technology to turn them into usable alloys? That’s been stuck in the 19th century: energy-intensive, emissions-heavy and dependent on hazardous fluoride salts. Gadolyn’s D-DIRECT platform takes a different approach: single-pass oxide reduction, no carbon-based reductants, water as the byproduct. The 2025 R&D 100 Award recognizes what that…

A scalable solid-state thermoelectric cooling technology using nano-engineered materials called CHESS (Controlled Hierarchically Engineered Superlattice Structures) has shown roughly double the materials performance near room temperature compared with conventional bulk thermoelectric materials. The work was developed at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, with Samsung Research collaborating on refrigeration-system testing and analysis. CHESS is designed to…