CCNY & partners make breakthrough… From a team of City College of New York physicists and their collaborators in Japan and Germany comes another advancement in the study of excitons — electrically neutral quasiparticles that exist in insulators, semi-conductors and some liquids. The researchers are announcing the creation of an “excitonic” wire, or one-dimensional channel for excitons. This in turn could result in innovative devices that could one day replace certain tasks that are now performed by standard transistor technology….
Printed polymers that change shape once in a predefined way when heated? This is now possible thanks to a 4D printing technology developed in the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Programmable Materials CPM. The extent of the change in shape of the printed objects is drastic: they can shrink by up to 63 percent. In the future, 4D manufacturing technologies could be used to produce parts that exhibit a specific behavior only after they take their predefined shape, for example as…
Cracked phone screens could become a thing of the past thanks to breakthrough research conducted at The University of Queensland. The global team of researchers, led by UQ’s Dr Jingwei Hou, Professor Lianzhou Wang and Professor Vicki Chen, have unlocked the technology to produce next-generation composite glass for lighting LEDs and smartphone, television and computer screens. The findings will enable the manufacture of glass screens that are not only unbreakable but also deliver crystal clear image quality. Dr Hou said the discovery was a…
Passive technology on roofs and facades could greatly reduce HVAC energy consumption. As anyone who has ever parked a car in the sun on a hot summer day knows, glass windows are great at letting sunlight in but terrible at allowing heat out. Now, engineers at Duke University have developed smart window-like technology that, with the flip of a switch, can alternate between harvesting heat from sunlight and allowing an object to cool. The approach could be a boon for…
Spontaneous wide-area spreading of oil on water inspires a facile energy-saving route of crafting electrically conductive nanostructures for future sensor/energy devices. Oil and water do not mix, but what happens where oil and water meet? Or where air meets liquid? Unique reactions occur at these interfaces, which a team of researchers based in Japan used to develop the first successful construction of uniform, electrically conductive nanosheets needed for next-generation sensors and energy production technologies. The research collaboration from Osaka Prefecture…
Road map for organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite semiconductors and devices. Climate change and its consequences are becoming increasingly obvious, and solar cells that convert the sun’s energy into electricity will play a key role in the world’s future energy supply. Common semiconductor materials for solar cells, such as silicon, must be grown via an expensive process to avoid defects within their crystal structure that affect functionality. But metal-halide perovskite semiconductors are emerging as a cheaper, alternative material class, with excellent and…
Scientists from Skoltech and their colleagues have used a 3D printer to fuse two materials in an alloy whose composition continuously changes from one region of the sample to the other, endowing the alloy with gradient magnetic properties. Despite the nonmagnetic nature of the constituent materials, the alloy exhibits magnetic properties. Published in The Journal of Materials Processing Technology, the study also offers a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon. Once perceived as a mere novelty tool for rapid prototyping, 3D printing…
Stronger than spider silk … Using natural silk from bagworms and a synthetic conducting polymer, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have developed a strong conducting fiber that demonstrates promise for flexible electronic materials. Think spider silk is strong? Recent work has shown that bagworm silk is superior to spider silk in both strength and flexibility. Building on these findings, a research team at the University of Tsukuba, led by Professor Hiromasa Goto, has harnessed the strength of bagworm silk…
A research led by scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has successfully developed a super-strong, highly ductile and super-light titanium-based alloy using additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3D printing. Their findings open up a new pathway to design alloys with unprecedented structures and properties for various structural applications. The research team was led by Professor Liu Chain-Tsuan, University Distinguished Professor in the College of Engineering and Senior Fellow of CityU’s Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS). Dr…
Vanderbilt and Penn State engineers have developed a novel approach to design and fabricate thin-film infrared light sources with near-arbitrary spectral output driven by heat, along with a machine learning methodology called inverse design that reduced the optimization time for these devices from weeks or months on a multi-core computer to a few minutes on a consumer-grade desktop. The ability to develop inexpensive, efficient, designer infrared light sources could revolutionize molecular sensing technologies. Additional applications include free-space communications, infrared beacons…
Totimorphic structural materials can achieve any shape. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a shape-shifting material that can take and hold any possible shape, paving the way for a new type of multifunctional material that could be used in a range of applications, from robotics and biotechnology to architecture. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Today’s shape-shifting materials and structures can only transition…
Scientists achieve stronger and more ductile pure titanium by processing it at ultra-low temperatures. Titanium is strong and lightweight, boasting the highest strength to weight ratio of any structural metal. But processing it while maintaining a good balance of strength and ductility – the ability of a metal to be drawn out without breaking – is challenging and expensive. As a result, titanium has been relegated to niche uses in select industries. Now, as reported in a recent study published…
Next-gen solar material could outshine other solar cells. An exciting new solar material called organic-inorganic halide perovskites could one day help the U.S. achieve its solar ambitions and decarbonize the power grid. One thousand times thinner than silicon, perovskite solar materials can be tuned to respond to different colors of the solar spectrum simply by altering their composition mix. Typically fabricated from organic molecules such as methylammonium and inorganic metal halides such as lead iodide, hybrid perovskite solar materials have…
When liquid meets gas, a unique zone forms. Variable by nature, molecules can cross from one state to another, combining in unique ways to either desirable or unwanted ends. From heat escaping a mug of coffee to increasing molecular concentrations in chemical solutions, gas-liquid interfaces are ubiquitous across nature and engineering. But a lack of tools capable of precisely controlling such gas-liquid interfaces limit their applications — until now. Researchers based at Osaka Prefecture University have developed the first controllable…
Rice engineers develop flexible, self-healing material to protect steel from the elements. An insulator of sulfur and selenium made with flexible devices in mind may have found its true destiny: As an anticorrosive coating for steel. The compound developed by the Rice University lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan proved itself more dielectric (insulating) than most flexible materials and more flexible than most dielectrics, making it a good candidate for components in electronics like bendable cellphones. At the same time, the material…
UCLA-led research could revise a 70-year-old model of how the fundamental building blocks of substances are assembled. Many substances around us, from table salt and sugar to most metals, are arranged into crystals. Because their molecules are laid out in an orderly, repetitive pattern, much is understood about their structure. However, a far greater number of substances — including rubber, glass and most liquids — lack that fundamental order throughout, making it difficult to determine their molecular structure. To date,…
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