Simple microstructures that bend, twist and perform stroke-like motions could be used for soft robotics, medical devices and more. For years, scientists have been attempting to engineer tiny, artificial cilia for miniature robotic systems that can perform complex motions, including bending, twisting, and reversing. Building these smaller-than-a-human-hair microstructures typically requires multi-step fabrication processes and varying stimuli to create the complex movements, limiting their wide-scale applications. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS)…

Researchers at Osaka University use silicon nanoparticles to help visualize the coalescence of quantized vortices that occur in superfluid helium, which can help improve our understanding of quantum fluids and materials, including superconductors. Scientists from the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University have shown how silicon nanoparticles can become trapped inside the vortices that form inside superfluid helium. This work opens up new possibilities in optical research for other quantum properties of superfluid helium, such as the optical…

Hydrogen is a key element in the energy transition. To ensure that hydrogen can become generally established as an energy source, it must be produced at market prices, in sufficient quantities and in a climate-neutral manner, and used with a high CO2 reduction rate. This requires affordable, robust hydrogen systems in the form of electrolyzers and fuel cells. With the intent of launching their serial production in the future, Reference-factory.H2 provides both a design for guidance and a modular system…

A new approach to battery design could provide the key to low-cost, long-term energy storage, according to Imperial College London researchers. The team of engineers and chemists have created a polysulfide-air redox flow battery (PSA RFB) with not one, but two membranes. The dual membrane design overcomes the main problems with this type of large-scale battery, opening up its potential to store excess energy from, for example, renewable sources such as wind and solar. The research is published in Nature…

Forming presses are widely used as key elements of industrial production processes. From automotive technology to refrigerators, almost every product we encounter contains formed parts. The purchasing costs of these machines can reach double-digit millions, and it takes a great deal of time to set up and adjust precisely as needed. Given such a high level of investment, buyers expect machinery of this kind to keep running efficiently for a long time without any loss in quality. At the Hannover…

… provides a full 360° phase tunable metasurface. ​The new strategy displays an unprecedented upper limit of dynamic phase modulation with no significant variations in optical amplitude. An international team of researchers led by Professor Min Seok Jang of KAIST and Professor Victor W. Brar of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has demonstrated a widely applicable methodology enabling a full 360° active phase modulation for metasurfaces while maintaining significant levels of uniform light amplitude. This strategy can be fundamentally applied to…

New High-Brightness Versions Launched. In addition to an energy-saving design, microdisplays for wearables must also display information in a way that they are sufficiently bright under daylight conditions, at best in colored versions and recognizable with the naked eye. The OLED microdisplay family of the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology FEP has now been extended: Microdisplays in a new design for ultra-high brightness. The new versions will be presented for the first time at the…

Screw connections on critical infrastructures are exposed to major stresses and must therefore be checked on a regular basis. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Internet Technologies CCIT have now developed a technology that allows the stability of the screw connections to be checked at any time by remote monitoring. This increases safety and reduces the time and effort spent on inspections. We come across screws almost everywhere. For instance, on cranes, scaffolding, high-rise buildings, bridges, wind turbines…

Fagron, a leading global company active in pharmaceutical compounding, announced on April 14th the acquisition of HiperScan, the German market leader for reliable raw material identification in pharmacies. HiperScan is a spin-off of Fraunhofer IPMS and the German market leader for reliable and secure identification of starting materials in pharmacies. HiperScan, a Dresden-based technology company, is a specialist in near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and emerged in 2006 as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS, developing innovative analysis…

“This study really sheds light on how we can design and manufacture battery electrodes to obtain a long cycle life for batteries,” said Feng Lin, an associate professor in chemistry at Virginia Tech. It doesn’t come on fast. It may take weeks to notice. You have the newly recharged lithium-ion AA batteries in the wireless kitty water fountain, and they last two days. They once lasted a week or more. Another round of charging, and they last one day. Soon,…

The left hand looks like the right hand in the mirror but the left-handed glove does not fit on the right hand. Chirality refers to this property where the object cannot be superimposed on to the mirror image. This property in molecules is an important factor in pharmaceutical research as it can turn drugs toxic. These molecules and mirror-symmetrical molecules have the same physical properties, and therefore cannot be distinguished using general optical analysis. Instead, polarized light – that spins…

The flexible, thin-film device has the potential to make any surface into a low-power, high-quality audio source. MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source. This thin-film loudspeaker produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. The hand-sized loudspeaker the team demonstrated, which weighs about as much as a dime, can generate high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is bonded…

Brass is used for many components, but welding the copper alloy is challenging. The Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) wants to change this together with LMB Automation GmbH, Iserlohn. In the project LaserMessing, they are developing a laser-based manufacturing system for automated production of brass components such as fittings, bearings, valves, turbines or heat exchangers. Within the project LaserMessing, the scientists of the LZH are working on a welding process that combines laser-based deep welding and cored wire processes. The…

… with Newly Developed On-the-Fly Laser Equipment. In order to be able to manufacture more efficient solar modules, the photovoltaic industry is increasingly switching its production to larger wafer formats. Being able to guarantee the production of these solar cells with an edge length of up to 210 millimeters with consistent quality and cycle rate poses new challenges for equipment manufacturers. A research team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy System ISE has now succeeded in implementing a novel…

While 3D printing techniques have advanced significantly in the last decade, the technology continues to face a fundamental limitation: objects must be built up layer by layer. But what if they didn’t have to be? Dan Congreve, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and former Rowland Fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University, and his colleagues have developed a way to print 3D objects within a stationary volume of resin. The printed object is fully supported by…

A major challenge for producers of electricity from solar panels and wind turbines is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle. Both solar and wind increasingly generate electricity amid little demand, when market prices are too low to cover costs. At noon on sunny days, for example, wholesale power prices in areas with high quantities of solar and wind occasionally fall below zero. Some renewable energy producers store their excess electricity as green hydrogen, using the electricity to produce hydrogen…