Materials • advanced

Driven by the consumer electronics, energy storage, and electric vehicle industries, the global demand for lithium is expected to rise 8.9 percent per year through 2019, said a Feb. 2 report from Freedonia Group. Demand for the metal is predicted to reach 49,350 tons in 2019, with a value of $1.7 billion. Demand will increase…

Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) have controlled wave-generated currents to make previously unimaginable liquid materials for new technological innovations, including techniques to manipulate micro-organisms. The new kind of dynamic material could be revolutionary, similar to other materials created in recent decades that have been used for invisibility cloaking, superlenses and high-efficiency antennae. Research…

Meller Optics, Inc. introduced custom-fabricated sapphire windows that can withstand extreme pressures and the rigors of harsh subsea applications while providing optimum visibility. Meller Sapphire Windows are ideal for subsea UAV applications requiring a clear, hard optical material that can withstand high pressures to 10,000 psi and resist saltwater, chemicals, and fast-moving particles. Featuring Mohs…

Scientists discovered three new uranium minerals, or uranyl minerals, growing on the walls of an abandoned uranium mine in Utah. The minerals were found and analyzed by researchers at Michigan Technological University. The three new minerals, leesite, leószilárdite and redcanyonite, are uranium oxide compounds, born of reactions between uranium and oxygen — uranium versions of…

Machines and devices used in modern industry are required to withstand harsh conditions. When the environmental temperature changes, the volume of the materials used to make these devices usually changes slightly, typically by less than 0.01 percent. Although this may seem like a trivial change, over time this thermal expansion can seriously degrade the performance…

Brainiac75 experiments with the magnetism of platinum-group metals.

Scientists have developed a new class of ingestible devices that derive power from stomach acid. The devices can operate for up to a week inside the digestive system. The electronic capsule prototypes were developed by a team of researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The capsules can…

Nature does amazing things with limited design materials. Grass, for example, can support its own weight, resist strong wind loads, and recover after being compressed. The plant’s hardiness comes from a combination of its hollow, tubular macrostructure and porous microstructure. These architectural features work together to give grass its robust mechanical properties. Inspired by natural…

For the first time, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have built and trained machine learning algorithms to predict defect behavior in certain intermetallic compounds with high accuracy. This method will accelerate research of new advanced alloys and lightweight new materials for applications spanning automotive to aerospace and much more. Their results…

BroadWave Technologies recently introduced its Model 651-030-006, a single-step voltage controlled programmable attenuator designed for use in scientific instruments. Key Features The frequency range is DC-1 GHz Attenuation range is 0-6 dB in a 6 dB step with ± 0.4 dB attenuation accuracy Insertion loss is 0.6 dB nominal while VSWR is 1.30:1 maximum Input…

This video from Stratasys outlines the evolution of PolyJet 3D printing materials over the past 13 years.

Barely wider than a strand of human DNA, magnetic nanoparticles — such as those made from iron and platinum atoms — are promising materials for next-generation recording and storage devices like hard drives. Building these devices from nanoparticles should increase storage capacity and density, but understanding how magnetism works at the level of individual atoms…

Chemical separation processes account for as much as 15 percent of the world’s total energy consumption. Development of next-generation molecularly-selective synthetic membranes will be among the drivers for more efficient, large-scale separation processes that could dramatically reduce that number.  In a paper published this week in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from the Georgia Institute of…

PEM® Type SL™ self-clinching steel locknuts from PennEngineering® integrate a unique TRI-DENT® locking feature to hold mating screws tight over time by providing sufficient torsional resistance to withstand vibration, thermal cycling, and other disruptive forces that could loosen the screws in service. These prevailing torque locknuts, which meet three-cycle locking performance to effectively “self-lock” the…

Ironwood Electronics recently introduced a new high-performance BGA socket for 1mm pitch, 121 pin BGA IC’s. The SG-BGA-6457 socket is designed for IC size — 12x12mm package size and operates at bandwidths up to 27 GHz with less than 1dB of insertion loss. The contact resistance is typically 20 milliohms per pin. Works with devices…

Electrical engineers at Duke University have created the world’s first electromagnetic metamaterial made without any metal. The device’s ability to absorb electromagnetic energy without heating up has direct applications in imaging, sensing, and lighting. Metamaterials are synthetic materials composed of many individual, engineered features that together produce properties not found in nature. Imagine an electromagnetic…

Will the next super materials be comprised of metallic ribbons of boron? Researchers at Rice found one-dimensional forms of boron, including both single-atom chains and two-atom-wide ribbons, feature unique physical qualities. They described the qualities in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. When stretched, the ribbons become antiferromagnetic semiconducting chains. During an antiferromagnetic moment, the…

Brainiac75 explores what happens when you place magnetic ferrofluid near a very strong magnet.

Crystals feature an atomic lattice structure repeated in space. Time crystals repeat their atomic structure in time. Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, laid out the theoretical blueprint for time crystals in a paper published last week in the journal Physical Review Letters. The new form of matter isn’t just hypothetical. Two…

A new project will study the fundamental mechanisms behind a method that uses electrical fields to enhance ceramics-sintering processing to manufacture components for a range of military and commercial applications. The components are expensive to manufacture because they are traditionally created from a powder that is sintered – or fused together – at around 1,500…

Adhesive mechanisms in the natural world, as used by geckos and other animals when they walk upside down on the ceiling, have many advantages: they are always strongly adhesive – and without any glues or residues. Scientists at Kiel University are researching how these mechanisms can be artificially created. An interdisciplinary research team from Materials…

Researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonic Materials and Fibre Devices, which is run by Fabien Sorin, have come up with a simple and innovative technique for drawing or imprinting complex, nanometric patterns on hollow polymer fibers. Their work has been published in Advanced Functional Materials. The potential applications of this breakthrough are numerous. The imprinted…

Chemists at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated that synthetic nanoparticles can achieve the same level of structural complexity, hierarchy and accuracy as their natural counterparts – biomolecules. The study, published in Science, also reveals the atomic-level mechanisms behind nanoparticle self-assembly. The findings from the lab of Chemistry Professor Rongchao Jin provide researchers with an important…

Physicist Fatima Ebrahimi at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has published a paper showing that magnetic reconnection — the process in which magnetic field lines snap together and release energy — can be triggered by motion in nearby magnetic fields. By running computer simulations, Ebrahimi gathered evidence indicating that…

Silicon crystals are the semiconductors most commonly used to make transistors, which are critical electronic components used to carry out logic operations in computing. However, as faster and more powerful processors are created, silicon has reached a performance limit: the faster it conducts electricity, the hotter it gets, leading to overheating. Graphene, made of a…