ORNL’s James Klett holds an LED streetlamp. The lamp will use heat sinks of graphite foam
(samples in his left hand) to extend the life of the LEDs and cut operating costs.

Around 1997, Oak Ridge National Lab’s James Klett and Timothy Burchell discovered how to make graphite foam, a material that had at least one amazing property: It transfers heat like crazy.

If this property of the foam seems a little counterintuitive, that’s because foam materials are often associated with with heat insulation properties. But in this case, the foam acts as a super heat radiator. A story in an ORNL newsletter said the stuff worked so well that if you put an ice cube on a hockey puck-sized chunk of the graphite foam, and put the foam on you hand, “the cube melts from your body heat as if it were on a hot griddle.”

At the time, Klett, a researcher in the lab’s Metals and Ceramics Division, noted that, “Graphite foam is as thermally conductive as aluminum at one-fifth the weight. It has a very high surface-area-to-weight ratio and a high heat transfer coefficient. This interests engineers and designers because products that use energy wage an ongoing battle with heat,” he says.

He said the key to the foam’s conductivity is its unusual graphite crystal structure that is full of air pockets, making it only 25% dense and lightweight. A network of graphite “ligaments” in the foam wicks heat away from its source.

Klett shows that ice held against the graphite foam will melt quickly because the heat from the hand holding the foam is transferred rapidly through the foam. As a result, this hand feels the cold fast.

When they made their discovery, Klett and Burchell were building on a legacy of carbon innovations that go back to at least the 1960s when Johhn Googin developed the first method to produce carbon foams was used as high-temperature furnace insulation. Klett and Burchell also developed a commercial carbon-carbon disk brakes system.

Over the past decade, Klett, Burchell and ORNL have licensed the special foam for numerous applications – especially with mechanical and electronic heat-transfer applications – and the material garnered an R&D 100 award.

Now, the foam’s ability to act as an efficient heat sink is being put to new uses in the world of energy-efficient lighting. On Friday, ORNL announced that it has licensed the foam to LED North America for use in commercial LED lighting systems such as in the large arrays now being manufactured for street lamps and parking garages.

The lab says passive cooling materials, such as the foam, are needed to increase LED efficiency and lifetime. ORNL reports that each 10° decrease in temperature can double the life of the lighting components. “While this technology will reduce temperatures and increase the life of the LED lighting systems, what it will really do is save municipalities millions of dollars every year in replacement fixture costs as well as maintenance,” Klett said.

Besides being lightweight, Klett says the foam is easy to machine and use in manufacturing. These advantages give it a growing edge compared to traditional heat transfer materials, such as copper or aluminum.

LED North America president Andrew Wilhelm predicts that the foam will double the life of the LED units. He also says the first lamps using the foam will be installed later this year in an ORNL parking lot.

Weddings, vacation, illness, travel days . . .  Looking back, sometimes there have been events that caused us to miss a few good ceramic- and glass-related developments and press releases. The stories in this grab bag have only a few cobwebs on them, so check ‘em out:

Cementing success: Startup that eyes radical shift in cement industry wins MIT $100K business-plan competition

Closing in on a carbon-based solar cell

Better boron nitride nanotubes may be on the way

Lasers at the cutting edge of science

Japanese company develops world’s first ultra-thin piezoelectric waterproof speaker

Murata Supplying World’s Smallest 0402*-Size 10μF 6.3V-Rated Monolithic Ceramic Capacitor

Nanospheres stretch limits of hard disk storage

and, a video from Onyx Solar: Paving the way for building integrated photovoltaics:

It’s far from a disinterested source, but Avalon Rare Metals tells me today that prices for individual rare earth elements have soared 22-705% since January:

“[T]he most significant rises have occurred since the June announcement on export quota reductions. The largest percentage price increases have been for cerium and lanthanum, which most analysts believe is largely due to China’s exporters limiting exports of the low valued light rare earths . . . With the exception of terbium, today’s prices for all the rare earths are the highest they have been since 2001, when price data became more widely available for individual rare earth elements. Based on a simple, un-weighted, arithmetic average, rare earth prices as a group have risen a remarkable 300% since the beginning of 2010!”

Some examples of REE price jumps* provided by Avalon:

* In U.S. dollars, FOB ex-China per kilogram, where prices are the mid-points between the bid and the ask prices on the reference dates.

** Avalon’s numbers corrected from original.

For more on the growing crunch on REEs, see Wendy Hankle’s “Rare earths: RESTRICTED” story in the online September issue of ACerS’ Bulletin.

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We’ve all heard that “out of nowhere” whack on home or office windows and later found the carcass of some poor bird lying below it. It’s easy to imagine that this scenario gets played out thousands of times a day around the world. But, until I ran across this story at Treehugger, I had no idea how big of a problem this is. According to German glassmaker Arnold Glas (Arnold Glaswerke), these bird-on-window collisions happen about 250,000 times a day in Europe, alone.

Arnold Glas’s solution is to treat glass panels with a special UV reflective coating visible to birds (which apparently can see a broader UV spectrum than humans) but is otherwise invisible to the public. The coating creates a web-like pattern of lines for the birds that look, at least to me, like a form of netting. The company calls this line of glass products Ornilux.

UV coating creates web-netting pattern visible to birds.

The company claims that it had researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology to test and compare Ornilux glass to alternatives, such as colored adhesive stripes and bird-silhouettes. The company’s websites says that,

“During these experiments various glass types were tested on over 850 birds from 19 different species. After capture, the wild birds were given time to recover and were then released in a flight tunnel. The birds could then fly towards one of two glass panels mounted at the end of the tunnel which were separated by a net. Of the two glass panels, one panel was made of common insulated glass as a control object and the other panel was used for testing the effectiveness of various glass types. The experimental results for Ornilux glass clearly showed that 76 % of the birds tested (representing 82 from 108 test flights) avoided the newly developed Ornilux panel and flew towards the conventional glass panel.”

As it turns out, Ornilux isn’t exactly a new line of glass, but perhaps described as newly recognized. Arnold Glas says it first used the glass in 2006 in a modernization of century-old swimming pool in the city of Plauen, in the German State of Saxony.

But, some recent publicity has stirred new interest in the Ornilux. This summer, a particular product in the line, Ornilux Mikado, received a prestigous Red Dot design award from Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany, a center that has been lauding international product designs and design agencies for nearly six decades.

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 that far even though the topic looked intriguing, but, I had a meeting to go to …

Anyway, it’s Friday, and rather than have these stories evaporate into the ether, I’ve close out each week by providing some raw links to some of these orphan tales. Check ‘em out:

Department of Energy Announces $188 Million for Small Business Technology Commercialization

Nanomaterials in the Construction Industry: A Review of Their Applications and Environmental Health and Safety Considerations

Nanopatterns on the cheap with Shrinky Dinks

Storage system levels energy demands