Wood, we come into close contact with it daily. Children play around on wood floors, and wood furniture plays an important role in our work and sleep habits as well. To keep this natural material from aging prematurely, it’s important to protect it against ultraviolet (UV) radiation. At the same time, people want to retain the look and feel of wooden surfaces, but the protective coatings that are currently available often contain harmful chemical compounds. To avoid using these substances,…

Research led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated that small changes in the isotopic content of thin semiconductor materials can influence their optical and electronic properties, possibly opening the way to new and advanced designs with the semiconductors. Partly because of semiconductors, electronic devices and systems become more advanced and sophisticated every day. That’s why for decades researchers have studied ways to improve semiconductor compounds to influence how they carry electrical current. One…

A new type of laser-based immersion probe, which the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen is testing as part of BMBF- and EU-funded projects with industrial partners and users, could pave the way for continuous inline monitoring of water treatment processes in wastewater treatment plants. The 2D fluorescence measurement method generates spectroscopic data directly on site in the clarifier. In conjunction with intelligent evaluation software, this process is the key to energy- and resource-efficient water treatment. It will…

Charge-recharge cycling of lithium-superrich iron oxide, a cost-effective and high-capacity cathode for new-generation lithium-ion batteries, can be greatly improved by doping with readily available mineral elements. The energy capacity and charge-recharge cycling (cyclability) of lithium-iron-oxide, a cost-effective cathode material for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, is improved by adding small amounts of abundant elements. The development, achieved by researchers at Hokkaido University, Tohoku University, and Nagoya Institute of Technology, is reported in the journal ACS Materials Letters. Lithium-ion batteries have become indispensable…

Engineers in Australia have found a new way to make power-pole insulators resistant to fire and electrical sparking, promising to prevent dangerous pole-top fires and reduce blackouts. Pole-top fires pose significant challenges to power providers and communities worldwide. In March, pole-top fires cut power from 40,000 homes and businesses in Perth. The 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements found that power outages experienced by 280,000 customers from various energy providers during Black Summer fires were mainly triggered by…

EU project HyFlow: Over three years of research, the consortium of the EU project HyFlow has successfully developed a highly efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective hybrid energy storage system (HESS) that can meet high energy and power demands. The researchers achieved this by combining a high-performance vanadium redox flow battery with a supercapacitor with water-based electrolytes. With one of the demonstrators developed in the HyFlow project, major energy consumers such as enterprises, municipal utility companies, medical facilities, and data centres can…

Potential alternative to widely used contrast agent gadolinium. Some of the world’s greatest discoveries happened by accident. While the discovery of diamond dust’s potential as a future MRI contrast agent may never be considered a turning point in science history, its signal-enhancing properties are nevertheless an unexpected finding which may open-up new possibilities: Diamond dust glows brightly even after days of being injected. Does that mean it could perhaps one day become an alternative to the widely used contrast agent…

… with monolithically integrated terahertz detectors for industrial applications. The Ferdinand-Braun-Institut has developed a terahertz (THz) line scanner for plastic components, enabling cost-effective realization of larger scan line lengths in industrial environments. For the first time, the technology demonstrator is based entirely on monolithically integrated THz detectors. There is hardly anyone who hasn’t encountered it yet, as terahertz radiation (THz) is routinely used at airports for security checks. It penetrates clothing, organic tissue, and many other materials including plastics, polymers,…

Scientists develop novel liquid metal alloy system to synthesize diamond under moderate conditions. Did you know that 99% of synthetic diamonds are currently produced using high-pressure and high-temperature (HPHT) methods?[2] A prevailing paradigm is that diamonds can only be grown using liquid metal catalysts in the gigapascal pressure range (typically 5-6 GPa, where 1 GPa is about 10,000 atm), and typically within the temperature range of 1300-1600 °C. However, the diamonds produced using HPHT are always limited to sizes of…

The electrode sheet of the thermoelectric device consists of ionic hydrogel, which is sandwiched between the electrodes to form, and the Prussian blue on the electrode undergoes a redox reaction to improve the energy density and power density of the ionic thermoelectric generator. Prof. Zeng Wei of the Institute of Chemical Engineering, Guangdong Academy of Sciences, said that at the beginning, the group mainly carried out research based on the thermal diffusion effect and published a series of research results….

In the production of printed circuit boards (PCBs), micrometer-diameter vias – known as microvias – are drilled through multilayer PCBs. Lasers can drill through these structures with high throughput and micrometer precision. A measurement technique based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is set to check the quality of the holes inline and control the process. Because of the high density of circuits and components, modern printed circuit boards are extremely challenging to manufacture. Lasers are used to drill the interconnects…

… for ultra-light and compact augmented reality systems. As part of the HOT project (High-performance transparent and flexible microelectronics for photonic and optical applications), scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS have developed a semi-transparent microdisplay. This microdisplay is significantly lighter than conventional combiner-based optical see-through near-to-eye systems and offers high resolution. The microdisplay will be presented at the SID Display Week 2024 in San Jose, USA, at the German Pavilion, booth number 1124. In today’s time, more…

Nebraska researcher Eric Markvicka gets NSF CAREER Award to pursue manufacture of novel materials for soft robotics and stretchable electronics. Engineers are increasingly eager to develop robots that mimic the behavior of animals and biological organisms, whose adaptability, resilience and efficiency have been refined over millions of years of evolution. In bringing bio-inspired robots to life, scientists must first create soft matter counterparts that match the softness and functionality of biological tissue. University of Nebraska–Lincoln engineer Eric Markvicka is at the forefront of…

Research team develops new idea to improve the properties of ultra-thin materials. Magnetic two-dimensional materials consisting of one or a few atomic layers have only recently become known and promise interesting applications, for example for the electronics of the future. So far, however, it has not been possible to control the magnetic states of these materials well enough. A German-American research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and Dresden University of Technology (TUD) is now presenting in the journal…

Researchers have uncovered a remarkable metal alloy that won’t crack at extreme temperatures due to kinking, or bending, of crystals in the alloy at the atomic level. A metal alloy composed of niobium, tantalum, titanium, and hafnium has shocked materials scientists with its impressive strength and toughness at both extremely hot and cold temperatures, a combination of properties that seemed so far to be nearly impossible to achieve. In this context, strength is defined as how much force a material…

Scientists have found evidence of an elusive, glassy phase of matter that emerges when a crystal’s perfect internal pattern is disrupted. X-ray technology and machine learning converge to shed light on the nature of complex materials. A dish made of crystal and a dish made of glass might look similar from the outside, but internally, their structures differ significantly. Crystals consist of perfectly ordered, repeating patterns of atoms, while glasses display a more disordered, fluid-like structure. For decades, scientists have…