Nanomaterials

New material developed for photocatalysis

By / August 25, 2010

Hollow rods of titanium oxide with the solid manganese oxide core removed. (Credit: UConn.) According to a University of Connecticut press release, researchers believe they have developed a new material…

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Mars cleaning tech offers method to sweep dust off Earth’s solar panels

By / August 25, 2010

PV panels on the Mars rover Spirit were covered with dust over a two-year period. Credit: NASA/JPL. Self-cleaning surfaces aren’t a particularly novel idea, and self-cleaning glass commercial products made…

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Active oxidation catalyst for Li–air batteries

By Esther Levy / August 24, 2010

Lithium batteries that utilize oxygen as the cathode material are very promising owing to their extremely high theoretical capacity of almost 12,000 Wh kg-1. In these lithium-air batteries, oxygen is…

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Nanowires boost the efficiency of ultra low-cost, stable solar cells

By Kitty Cha / August 24, 2010

One of the ways of ensuring a sustainable solar cell industry is to make cheap and stable cells, using abundant and environmentally friendly materials. However, until now, many such solar…

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Flexible cellulose aerogel to overcome brittleness

By / August 24, 2010

PopSci recently reported that a team of researchers have created a new cellulose aerogel. The researched was published in Nature Nanotechnology. The team, composed of scientists from the Department of…

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Electron irradiation to minimize loops in graphene

By / August 24, 2010

Loops (seen above in blue) between graphene layers can be minimized using electron irradiation (bottom). (Credit: ORNL) According to a press release, researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab have discovered…

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Materials stories that missed the cut this week

By / August 20, 2010

At the end of each week, I end up with a list of a bunch of stories I started to write about, or started to investigate or didn’t even get…

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Less platinum, better efficiency for fuel cells

By / August 20, 2010

The multimetallic nanoparticle created by Brown University chemists for fuel-cell reactions uses a palladium core and an iron-platinum shell. Credit: Sun Lab/Brown University According to a Brown University press release,…

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Missouri S&T gets funding to develop battlefield ‘smart dust’

By / August 19, 2010

Smart dust components. (Credit: University of California Berkeley Roboticsand Intelligent Machines Lab.) A significant trend in electronics technology is the increasing ability to provide adaptive features into smaller and smaller…

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A123’s launching new lithium flow battery project: ’24M’

By / August 19, 2010

Chiang at 2009 Materials Challenge for Alternative andRenewable Energy meeting. Credit: ACerS. When I interviewed Yet Ming Chiang, one of the brains behind A123 System’s lithium-ion battery technology, in 2009,…

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