Spinoff of KIT facilitates moves and replacements of production plants. Old production machinery has to be replaced due to changed requirements. However, high weight and limited space in plants often make it very difficult to assemble and disassemble big machines or to reposition them. Frequently, this is done by hand using heavy-duty rollers. FORMIC Transportsysteme, a spinoff of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has developed a semi-automatic transportation system for the replacement of production plants, which works like a swarm….

… for faster charging electric vehicles. A new study led by Dr. Xuekun Lu from Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with an international team of researchers from the UK and USA has found a way to prevent lithium plating in electric vehicle batteries, which could lead to faster charging times. The paper was published in the journal Nature Communications. Lithium plating is a phenomenon that can occur in lithium-ion batteries during fast charging. It occurs when lithium ions…

Produced with techniques borrowed from Japanese paper-cutting, the strong metal lattices are lighter than cork and have customizable mechanical properties. Cellular solids are materials composed of many cells that have been packed together, such as a honeycomb. The shape of those cells largely determines the material’s mechanical properties, including its stiffness or strength. Bones, for instance, are filled with a natural      material that enables them to be lightweight, but stiff and strong. Inspired by bones and other cellular solids found in nature, humans have used the same…

Soft materials are ubiquitous in our daily lives, from the food we eat to the products we use to the materials that make up our bodies. Some examples of soft materials include cream, toothpaste, and blood. Most soft materials are complex fluids, which means that they contain a macroscopically uniform mixture of two or more phases. The dynamic competition between the structures of phases in a soft material can have a significant impact on not only its properties, but also…

If coal and natural gas power generation were 2% more efficient, then, every year, there could be 460 million fewer tons of carbon dioxide released and 2 trillion fewer gallons of water used. A recent innovation to the steam cycle used in fossil fuel power generation could achieve this. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a coating for steam condensers used in fossil fuel steam-cycle generation that is made with fluorinated diamond-like carbon, or F-DLC. The researchers…

Eco-driving technology can significantly improve the energy efficiency of both electric, internal combustion vehicles. A Southwest Research Institute project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has demonstrated an average of 15% energy savings when vehicles outfitted with connected and automated vehicle systems, or CAVs, are introduced into traffic. CAVs use wireless smart technology to communicate with other CAVs and traffic infrastructure. SwRI’s eco-driving framework uses custom software and predictive powertrain algorithms to enable human drivers to make more efficient…

Crackling noise of atoms shifting at nanoscale key to understanding novel materials for future electronics. A recent UNSW-led paper published in Nature Communications presents an exciting new way to listen to avalanches of atoms in crystals. The nanoscale movement of atoms when materials deform leads to sound emission. This so-called crackling noise is a scale-invariant phenomenon found in various material systems as a response to external stimuli such as force or external fields. Jerky material movements in the form of avalanches can…

Researchers from Japan and Vietnam develop a new approach that utilizes fuzzy logic to estimate unknown parameters and control nonlinear pneumatic artificial muscles. In recent years, pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) have emerged as promising actuators for simulating human-like movements, with prominent applications in various industries including robotics, rehabilitation, and prosthetics. PAMs are usually composed of rubber and covered with braided yarn and can mimic the mechanics of human muscles. They can stiffen and contract on being supplied with pressurized air…

Materials are often considered to be one phase, but many engineering materials contain two or more phases, improving their properties and performance. These two-phase materials have inclusions, called precipitates, embedded in the microstructure. Alloys, a combination of two or more types of metals, are used in many applications, like turbines for jet engines and light-weight alloys for automotive applications, because they have very good mechanical properties due to those embedded precipitates. The average precipitate size, however, tends to increase over…

The process could usher in an era of shot-free vaccines, researchers say. Rutgers scientists have devised a highly accurate method for creating coatings of biologically active materials for a variety of medical products. Such a technique could pave the way for a new era of transdermal medication, including shot-free vaccinations, the researchers said. Writing in Nature Communications, researchers described a new approach to electrospray deposition, an industrial spray-coating process. Essentially, Rutgers scientists developed a way to better control the target…

A new study led by the Flatiron Institute’s Aavishkar Patel has identified a mechanism that explains the unusual behavior of strange metals, considered one of the greatest open challenges in condensed matter physics. For nearly 40 years, materials called ‘strange metals’ have flummoxed quantum physicists, defying explanation by operating outside the normal rules of electricity. Now research led by Aavishkar Patel of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) in New York City has identified, at long last,…

…for a hundredfold reduction in the power consumption of future chips. Electronic devices are shrinking all the time. At the same time, the computer chips inside them are getting more and more powerful, but they are also using more energy, and running hotter. This makes it essential to find new ways to reduce the power consumption of high-performance computers. A new EU-funded project has brought together a high-profile consortium from science and industry to investigate how changes to the magnetic…

Rice lab discovers commonly used nanoparticles are cousins of original buckyballs. Rice University chemists have discovered that tiny gold “seed” particles, a key ingredient in one of the most common nanoparticle recipes, are one and the same as gold buckyballs, 32-atom spherical molecules that are cousins of the carbon buckyballs discovered at Rice in 1985. Carbon buckyballs are hollow 60-atom molecules that were co-discovered and named by the late Rice chemist Richard Smalley. He dubbed them “buckminsterfullerenes” because their atomic…

Researchers at the University of Bayreuth, together with partners in China and the USA, have produced an oxide glass with unprecedented toughness. Under high pressures and temperatures, they succeeded in paracrystallizing an aluminosilicate glass: The resulting crystal-like structures cause the glass to withstand very high stresses and are retained under ambient conditions. Paracrystallization thus proves to be a promising process for producing extremely break-resistant glasses. In “Nature Materials”, the researchers present their findings, in which the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY)…

A new technique developed at Columbia offers a systematic evaluation of twist angle and strain in layered 2D materials. Think you know everything about a material? Try giving it a twist­—literally. That’s the main idea of an emerging field in condensed matter physics called “twistronics,” which has researchers drastically changing the properties of 2D materials, like graphene, with subtle changes—as small as going from a 1.1° to 1.2°—in the angle between stacked layers. Twisted layers of graphene, for example, have…

Systems in the Universe trend toward disorder, with only applied energy keeping the chaos at bay. The concept is called entropy, and examples can be found everywhere: ice melting, campfire burning, water boiling. Zentropy theory, however, adds another level to the mix.   A team led by Zi-Kui Liu, the Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State, developed the theory. The “Z” in zentropy stands for the German word Zustandssumm, meaning ‘‘sum over states” of entropy….