World first: Fraunhofer IWS for the very first time prints quadrupole components for linear accelerators. A new generation of particle accelerators aims at taking cancer therapy, drug detection and material analysis to a higher level: These linear accelerators are so compact that they are becoming affordable even for smaller hospitals, airports and laboratories. To support this development, the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS, together with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, Latvia’s Riga Technology…

3D Printing Photo Report… Additive Manufacturing, AM in brief, is fascinating: As if by magic, complex workpieces grow in 3D printers: layer by layer by layer … – without human intervention, as it may seem at first glance. But the technology is demanding and requires a lot of manual work with a sure touch, as a visit to the expert team at the Swiss m4m Center in Bettlach shows. The Technology Transfer Center in Bettlach near Solothurn does not work…

TU Graz, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, AVL and Fraunhofer Austria have developed a method to validate test drives through highly realistic driving simulation studies and to substantially simplify the approval process for automated driving systems. Driving simulator tests are popular – for understandable reasons: any scenario can be simulated at the touch of a button. They are independent of time and weather conditions and without any safety risk for the vehicle, people or the environment. Moreover, an hour in the driving simulator…

Scientists at ETH Zurich have built a plant that can produce carbon-neutral liquid fuels from sunlight and air. The next goal will be to take this technology to industrial scale and achieve competitiveness. In a paper published in the scientific journal “Nature”, researchers from Zurich and Potsdam describe how this novel solar reactor functions and outline a policy framework that would provide incentives to expand the production of “solar kerosene”. Carbon-neutral fuels are crucial for making aviation and maritime transport…

Using pyrolysis, dewaxing catalyst to upcycle plastic waste into fuel source. More than 300 million tons of plastic waste are produced annually, which causes serious environmental issues because of plastic’s life cycle and the difficulty of eliminating it. Consequently, most plastic waste ends up in either a landfill or the ocean. A significant number of plastics break down into microplastics, which are ingested by fish and other marine life causing havoc to marine ecosystems. In Journal of Renewable and Sustainable…

— thanks to graphene innovation. Space habitats of the future being designed using revolutionary graphene-based composite. Advanced manufacturing experts from Manchester have revealed what human life in space could look like – with a graphene-enhanced space habitat developed to meet anticipated demand for human settlements beyond Earth. A community of specialists at The University of Manchester have teamed up with global architect firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to research the design and manufacturing of space habitats for the space…

UBCO researchers cook up jet fuel with graphene nanomaterials. The goal of creating a cleaner fuel for aircraft engines is creating a spark at UBC Okanagan. A team of researchers studying the burning rate of nanomaterials in liquid fuels believe they have created a recipe for a clean-burning, power-boosting aircraft fuel. The project is a collaboration between the School of Engineering’s Combustion for Propulsion and Power Laboratory (CPPL) and its Nanomaterials and Polymer Nanocomposites Laboratory. Inside the CPPL, researchers watch…

Why when walking in the city we do not enter blind alleys, or at least it happens to us very rarely, rather only when we lose our train of thought? Thanks to our perception (i.e., seeing appropriate signs and assessing distances) we are able to predict that there is an obstacle in front of us – we do not have to check it at all while walking to the end of the street. We are able to move onto the…

A team of engineers at the University of South Florida has invented new technology that could forever change the manufacturing of wearable, electronic sensors. They’ve figured out a way to speed up production without having to use polymer binders – the industry standard in printing flexible sensors, which are often used to monitor vital signs in health care settings. Their technology, featured on the cover of the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, prints electronic skin, or “e-skin,” by using…

Australian researchers have developed disruptive technology allowing autonomous vehicles to track running pedestrians hidden behind buildings, and cyclists obscured by larger cars, trucks, and buses. The autonomous vehicle uses game changing technology that allows it to “see” the world around it, including using x-ray style vision that penetrates through to pedestrians in blind spots and to detect cyclists obscured by fast-moving vehicles. The iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre-funded project collaborating with the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Field Robotics and…

The device you are currently reading this article on was born from the silicon revolution. To build modern electrical circuits, researchers control silicon’s current-conducting capabilities via doping, which is a process that introduces either negatively charged electrons or positively charged “holes” where electrons used to be. This allows the flow of electricity to be controlled and for silicon involves injecting other atomic elements that can adjust electrons— known as dopants—into its three-dimensional (3D) atomic lattice. Silicon’s 3D lattice, however, is…

CCNY & partners make breakthrough… From a team of City College of New York physicists and their collaborators in Japan and Germany comes another advancement in the study of excitons — electrically neutral quasiparticles that exist in insulators, semi-conductors and some liquids. The researchers are announcing the creation of an “excitonic” wire, or one-dimensional channel for excitons. This in turn could result in innovative devices that could one day replace certain tasks that are now performed by standard transistor technology….

Printed polymers that change shape once in a predefined way when heated? This is now possible thanks to a 4D printing technology developed in the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Programmable Materials CPM. The extent of the change in shape of the printed objects is drastic: they can shrink by up to 63 percent. In the future, 4D manufacturing technologies could be used to produce parts that exhibit a specific behavior only after they take their predefined shape, for example as…

Cracked phone screens could become a thing of the past thanks to breakthrough research conducted at The University of Queensland. The global team of researchers, led by UQ’s Dr Jingwei Hou, Professor Lianzhou Wang and Professor Vicki Chen, have unlocked the technology to produce next-generation composite glass for lighting LEDs and smartphone, television and computer screens. The findings will enable the manufacture of glass screens that are not only unbreakable but also deliver crystal clear image quality. Dr Hou said the discovery was a…

Passive technology on roofs and facades could greatly reduce HVAC energy consumption. As anyone who has ever parked a car in the sun on a hot summer day knows, glass windows are great at letting sunlight in but terrible at allowing heat out. Now, engineers at Duke University have developed smart window-like technology that, with the flip of a switch, can alternate between harvesting heat from sunlight and allowing an object to cool. The approach could be a boon for…

Scientists developed an efficient generator… Thermoelectric generator of new generation is ten times more efficient than its analogues. Researchers from Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) in collaboration with an industrial partner elaborated thermoelectric generator of new generation, which is ten times more efficient than its analogues currently available on the market. The final product will be implemented by an industrial partner at the end of 2021. The project is conducted within the framework of the program World class…