Materials & Innovations

To infinitesimal and beyond – an electron structure explanation of supercapacitance

By Eileen De Guire / June 24, 2011

Computational modeling of carbon supercapacitors with the effects of surface curvature included. Credit: Jingsong Huang, ORNL A fair number of recent posts have been about nanostructured porous materials (PCCMs, diamond…

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New barium oxide/nickel interface demonstrated for self-cleaning, lower temp SOFC anode

By / June 23, 2011

Regents professor Meilin Liu (right) and postdoctoral researcher Mingfei Liu examine a button fuel cell used to evaluate a new self-cleaning anode material based on barium oxide. The self-cleaning technique…

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R&D 100 winners to speak at Ceramic Leadership Summit

By Eileen De Guire / June 23, 2011

R&D 100 Award winners: George Wicks (left) and SRNL team members pictured with flame-former apparatus. Credit: ORNL and ACerS Bulletin. For the last 49 years, the science and engineering community…

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R&D 100 Awards recognize materials innovations

By Eileen De Guire / June 23, 2011

  SRNL microsphere filled with palladium where the top of the microballoon has been removed to view the inside. Source: The Bulletin, Vol. 87, No. 6, p. 26 The R&D…

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Video of the week: The Shirtsleeve Invention

By / June 22, 2011

I learned about the existence of this video after I wrote my review of Gloria Beasley Lausten’s book about the work by her husband (Bob Beasley) on the NASA’s Space…

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Ceramics and glass business news this week

By / June 21, 2011

Swedish company producing low-cost aerogel pellets. Credit Svenska Aerogel. Here’s what we are hearing: NASA gives Ceralink SBIR award for microwave-processed multifunctional polymer matrix composites Ceralink Inc. announced that it has…

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Beasley biography details quest for space shuttle’s thermal protection system

By / June 21, 2011

If mechanical systems and the weather cooperate, July 8 will bring the 135rd and final mission of the American Space Shuttle program (STS-135). Coincidentally, I recently received a charming biography…

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Materials stories that may also be of interest

By / June 17, 2011

UC Santa Barbara researchers (see story below) were able to link Einstein’s general theory of relativity to a totally different area of physics and hope the tools will one day…

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The Energy Race and the search for commodity catalyst materials

By Eileen De Guire / June 14, 2011

Illustration of the way the electronic configuration of metal ions can control the activity of metal oxides for oxygen reduction, varying it by a factor of at least 10,000 times.…

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Tunable mechanical properties in nanoscale porous gold

By Eileen De Guire / June 13, 2011

SEM of nanoporous gold structure. Credit: Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. Several recent, unrelated posts have been about materials with nanoscale porosity (diamond aerogels, chalcogenide PCMM). Here is another…

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