A highly durable and moreover self-lubricating material has seen the light of day at a thin film laboratory at Linköping University.

It is an alloy of boron suboxide and yttrium, BOY, and was grown by the physicist Denis Music. The discovery is put forward in his doctoral dissertation.

The element boron and its compounds have many interesting properties, but they have been difficult to exploit industrially because production involves extreme process conditions. To produce a crystal

Plans are underway to test new system

The nations current electric grid system will not work in the future with solar and wind farms providing substantial but intermittent power over long distances.

By 2050, it will take between 15 and 20 Terawatts (TW) of electric power to supply the North American economy. A little under 7 TW is currently used, with most of that consumed in the United States. The “Smart Electric Grid of the Future” must be able to efficiently and securely

Assisted by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, PKC Group, Finland works to develop bus technology applications for use in the power distribution and control systems on commercial vehicles. The concept is to offer customers flexible intelligent features while reducing the amount of wiring. The new LIN (Local Interconnect Network) technology was recently deemed to be the most promising technology to fulfil vehicle manufacturers’ new technological specifications.

To succeed in compe

A new “smart blending” process developed by Clemson University researchers could change the way plastics are made and improve their performance. Early results published in August’s Polymer Engineering and Science have already drawn interest from European and United States plastics manufacturers.

Dave Zumbrunnen, who heads the Clemson research team, said smart blending could bring plastics production into the 21st century. “Most people would be surprised to learn that many plastics are n

A very efficient engine, plenty of room for instruments, accurate performance, good price. All these features characterise ESA’s SMART-1, due for launch during the night of 27-28 September.

SMART-1 is much smaller, cheaper and, in many ways, ’more powerful’ than conventional spacecraft. Its secret lies in several new technologies being tested on board, which will be essential for spacecraft of the future. But this space adventure is not only for engineers; scientists t

Many of Europe’s historic buildings, monuments and civil engineering structures are gradually decaying. Already weakened by age, they are damaged by earth tremors, pollution and traffic vibration. And this is more than just a cultural problem. Continual maintenance is extremely costly and obtrusive, not least because of its negative impact upon tourism and traffic.

Conventional rehabilitation methods using wooden or steel buttresses, tie rods and scaffolding supports dominate the landscape a

Sudden price spikes have led to speculation that the United States is facing a critical shortage of natural gas. But a new study by Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) concludes that gas supplies are likely to meet growing demand in coming decades, if policy-makers are able to strike a balance between environmental protection and the need for new energy sources.

“Recent volatile natural gas prices do not foreshadow a pending, long-term crisis in future natural gas supplie

Fabric has been dyed by the same wasteful method for over 100 years. This involves chemical agents being added to a dye bath and thrown away afterwards. A new process developed by EUREKA project E! 2625 EUROENVIRON ECDVAT (ElectroChemical Dyeing with Vat dyes) replaces environmentally damaging chemical reducing agents with electrons.

According to Prof. Dr. Thomas Bechtold of the University of Innsbruck’s Textiles Department, the new process can be more easily controlled. Using the conventio

A ceramic material reinforced with carbon nanotubes has been made by materials scientists at UC Davis. The new material is far tougher than conventional ceramics, conducts electricity and can both conduct heat and act as a thermal barrier, depending on the orientation of the nanotubes.

Ceramic materials are very hard and resistant to heat and chemical attack, making them useful for applications such as coating turbine blades, said Amiya Mukherjee, professor of chemical engineering and mater

Ames Laboratory researchers identify non-brittle intermetallics

To material scientists the phrase “ductile intermetallic compounds” has long been considered an oxymoron. Although these compounds possess chemical, physical, electrical, magnetic, and mechanical properties that are often superior to ordinary metals, their potential has gone untapped because they are typically quite brittle at room temperature. Until now.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames

A tailored, cage-like silica structure, developed by Penn State researchers, is easier and less expensive to make than previous materials and is tunable in size.

“Previous attempts at synthesizing materials like PSU-1 involved specially designed templates making the process expensive,” says Dr. Sridhar Komarneni, professor of clay mineralogy. “The processes also require stringent conditions for the synthesis to work.” Komarneni, working with Dr. Bharat L. Newalkar, postdoctoral fellow in Pe

Using molecules resembling 60-sided soccer balls, a joint team of researchers from the University of Toronto and Carleton University has created a new material for processing information using light.

Led by U of T electrical and computer engineering professor Ted Sargent and Carleton University chemistry professor Wayne Wang, the team developed a material that combines microscopic spherical particles known as “buckyballs” with polyurethane, the polymer used as a coating on cars and furnitur

Researchers envision mass-produced rolls of material that converts sunlight to electricity

Princeton electrical engineers have invented a technique for making solar cells that, when combined with other recent advances, could yield a highly economical source of energy.

The results, reported in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature, move scientists closer to making a new class of solar cells that are not as efficient as conventional ones, but could be vastly less expensive and more ver

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are using a very small and light ion, the electron, to study the structure and dynamics of ionic liquids and how those properties influence chemical reactivity.

Ionic liquids are made of positive and negative ions that pack so poorly together that they are liquids near room temperature. They offer extremely low volatility, non-flammability, new reactivity patterns, and the formation of separate phases that all

It may soon be possible to produce a low cost, high-value, high-strength fiber from a biodegradable and renewable waste product for air filtration, water filtration and agricultural nanotechnology, report polymer scientists at Cornell University. The achievement is the result of using the recently perfected technique of electrospinning to spin nanofibers from cellulose.

“Cellulose is the most abundant renewable resource polymer on earth. It forms the structure of all plants,” says Margaret

Creating unique structures

Researchers have developed a laser-based technique for creating patterns in self-assembled colloidal crystals produced from hydrogel nanoparticles – soft spheres that respond to heat by changing size. The development could make possible the fabrication of waveguides, three-dimensional microlenses and other photonic structures from the unusual crystals.

In related work, the Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have also learned to use weak at