Fraunhofer program to fight against the pandemic … The disinfection robot BALTO — named after a sled dog who carried urgently needed vaccines to a highly inaccessible region of Alaska a hundred years ago — is capable of disinfecting door knobs and similar objects. It does this autonomously, reacting to human beings in the surrounding area at the same time. An interface with the Building Information Modeling (BIM) process makes this possible. Never before has hygiene attracted so much attention…

Renewable energies and hydrogen technology The idea is that private customers will, in the future, be able to produce the hydrogen they need using small wind turbines. Lightweight construction experts at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP, at BTU Cottbus and an industrial partner are now developing the key technologies required: small, efficient rotors and safe tanks. According to data from the German Environment Agency, private households currently are responsible for about a quarter of Germany’s energy consumption…

Hydrogen in hybrid perovskites: Researchers identify the defect that limits solar-cell performance. Researchers in the materials department in UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering have uncovered a major cause of limitations to efficiency in a new generation of solar cells. Various possible defects in the lattice of what are known as hybrid perovskites had previously been considered as the potential cause of such limitations, but it was assumed that the organic molecules (the components responsible for the “hybrid” moniker) would…

Improving the Production of Battery Cells … Setting up high-performance production centers for battery cells is high on the current agenda of the automotive industry. The Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen is proactively working towards this goal: In the BMBF project “HoLiB” and the AiF project “MikroPuls”, for example, scientists from Aachen are investigating how laser technology can be used to economically contact and join dissimilar materials. The trend away from the combustion engine to the electric…

Fraunhofer IKTS acquires the transparent ceramics division and the PERLUCOR brand from the ceramics company CeramTec-ETEC. An R&D center for transparent ceramics will be set up at the IKTS site in Hermsdorf. As of April 1, 2021, the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS will take over the transparent ceramics division of the company CeramTec-ETEC, known for its brand name PERLUCOR®. The institute thus significantly expands its existing competencies in the development of transparent ceramics. The technical infrastructure…

Researchers demonstrate that magnetism and superconductivity can coexist in graphene, opening a pathway towards graphene-based topological qubits. In the quantum realm, electrons can group together to behave in interesting ways. Magnetism is one of these behaviors that we see in our day-to-day life, as is the rarer phenomena of superconductivity. Intriguingly, these two behaviors are often antagonists, meaning that the existence of one of them often destroys the other. However, if these two opposite quantum states are forced to coexist…

The ability to turn on and off a physical process with just one photon is a fundamental building block for quantum photonic technologies. Realizing this in a chip-scale architecture is important for scalability, which amplifies a breakthrough by City College of New York researchers led by physicist Vinod Menon. They’ve demonstrated for the first time the use of “Rydberg states” in solid state materials (previously shown in cold atom gases) to enhance nonlinear optical interactions to unprecedented levels in solid…

An international team with researchers from the University of Bayreuth has succeeded for the first time in discovering a previously unknown two-dimensional material by using modern high-pressure technology. The new material, beryllonitrene, consists of regularly arranged nitrogen and beryllium atoms. It has an unusual electronic lattice structure that shows great potential for applications in quantum technology. Its synthesis required a compression pressure that is about one million times higher than the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere. The scientists have presented…

New interfacial superconductor has novel properties that raise new fundamental questions and might be useful for quantum information processing or quantum sensing. Interfaces in solids form the basis for much of modern technology. For example, transistors found in all our electronic devices work by controlling the electrons at interfaces of semiconductors. More broadly, the interface between any two materials can have unique properties that are dramatically different from those found within either material separately, setting the stage for new discoveries….

The now-familiar sight of traditional propeller wind turbines could be replaced in the future with wind farms containing more compact and efficient vertical turbines. New research from Oxford Brookes University has found that the vertical turbine design is far more efficient than traditional turbines in large scale wind farms, and when set in pairs the vertical turbines increase each other’s performance by up to 15%. A research team from the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics (ECM) at Oxford Brookes…

Synthesis of Large-Area 2D Material … Elbow mentality in a two-dimensional material: This has recently been discovered by an international team led by the Center for Nanointegration (CENIDE) at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE): The physicists succeeded in creating boron layers with a height of a single atom. While growing, the material simply pushes interfering steps on the substrate out of the way. The team published its results in the scientific journal ACS Nano. The team led by UDE’s Prof….

Neutrons “see” internal stress in component from additive manufacturing. 3D printing has opened up a completely new range of possibilities. One example is the production of novel turbine buckets. However, the 3D printing process often induces internal stress in the components which can in the worst case lead to cracks. Now a research team has succeeded in using neutrons from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) research neutron source reactor for non-destructive detection of this internal stress – a key…

35.9 % for III-V//Silicon Solar Cell … Fraunhofer ISE has been conducting cutting-edge research in photovoltaics for forty years. Continually the institute has brought forth record cell efficiencies in different material classes and made important contributions in reducing the costs of solar electricity, which is the cheapest form of energy generation today. Photovoltaics, along with wind energy, is the central pillar of the energy transition. Aiming to further reduce the area required for PV installations as well as material use,…

In extreme heat or in the vacuum of space: a novel nanomaterial delivers top performance in extreme situations, as demonstrated by TU Wien (Vienna) with international partners. You can lubricate a bicycle chain with oil, but what do you do with a Mars rover or a red-hot conveyor belt in the steel industry? Very special nanomaterials have now been studied by the TU Wien together with research groups from Saarbrücken (Germany), Purdue University in the USA and the Universidad de…

New optics-on-a-chip device paves way to capturing fast chemical, material and biological processes. Researchers have developed new x-ray optics that can be used to harness extremely fast pulses in a package that is significantly smaller and lighter than conventional devices used to modulate x-rays. The new optics are based on microscopic chip-based devices known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). “Our new ultrafast optics-on-a-chip is poised to enable x-ray research and applications that could have a broad impact on understanding fast-evolving chemical,…

Max Planck scientists publish latest results in the journal Science Advances … Metals are one of the most important materials in our civilization due to their excellent strength and formability. The possibility to permanently deform and shape metals without breaking, makes them the material of choice for many high-tech products. Their plastic deformation is typically carried by motion of defects called dislocations, in the lattice structure. As the dislocations move, they deform the material permanently, allowing the metal to assume…