GE locomotive battery. Credit: GE Global Research.

Once again, Alfred University is in the news for working with a corporate partner under the auspices of a New York State technology initiative. School officials have just announced that the university and General Electric have signed a contract to develop a new generation of sodium metal halide batteries as part of a consortium funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Just a few weeks back, we wrote how research groups at the school were leveraging expertise in advanced ceramics, glass and cutting-edge materials to develop working relationships with companies to develop interconnects for fuel cells and GaN-on-diamond substrate projects with private partners, also under the auspices of NYSERDA.

According to an AU press release, the latest project involves developing huge sodium metal halide batteries for applications that include hybrid locomotives and back-up power for telecommunication sites. Doreen Edwards, dean of the Inamori School of Engineering at AU says the research will focus on improving battery reliability, cycle life and performance.

The consortium, led by GE Global Research, includes AU, Clarkson University, Columbia University, SUNY-Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Lab.

In the release, Matthew Hall, an AU engineering professor, says, ”This is a fantastic opportunity for Alfred because it directly complements our research interests and expertise. At least half of our research effort is devoted to energy applications. And a lot [of the work] would be an extension of the work done on fuel cells here for the last decade.”

Hall is also director of AU’s Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology, which exists to facilitate collaboration between industry and academia. CACT receives financial support from another New York State sci-tech initiative, NYSTAR.

According to Edwards, there will be at least three major components to AU’s work. The first will be to develop a more durable and conductive ceramic electrolyte separating the cathode from the anode and will likely focus on improving the mechanical and electrical properties of beta-alumina solid electrolyte.

The second will be to identify a more robust and corrosion-resistant glass for encasing the batteries’ electrical components. According to Edwards, AU and GEGR will develop accelerated glass stability tests to understand glass corrosion mechanisms and predict seal life.

Finally, AU will also be developing computational models to accelerate further improvements, including meso-scale computer simulations to refine beta-alumina solid electrolyte sample properties and a model for predicting the thermal properties as a function of glass composition.

“We are very excited to work with Alfred University to improve our sodium metal halide battery technology,” says Job Rijssenbeek, GEGR principal investigator. “Alfred’s expertise in ceramics and glasses is world renownd and we’ve had extremely productive collaborations in the past.”

With that type of reputation, its no wonder AU and its Inamori School of Engineering seem to be on a roll with these private sector collaborations.

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A recent article in The Economist says manufacturers are starting to see materials innovations as critical to developing game-changing products.

A recent article in article in The Economist takes a look ways certain manufacturers that depend on innovation have figured out that the best, cheapest and quickest results come from having materials scientists, design engineers and production engineers within spitting distance of each other. It used to be that these functions were separated, sometimes by large distances, perhaps even by countries. The article quotes Hamid Mughal, Rolls-Royce head of manufacturing engineering, saying, “Product technology is the key to survival, and manufacturing excellence provides one of the biggest opportunities in the future. … Incremental increases won’t do it.”

Companies are realizing that materials engineers need to be part of those teams. The article gives examples such as GE’s development of a “nickel-and-salt” battery for a hybrid locomotive engine application. Another example is the development of carbon fiber composites for fan blades, aircraft fuselages and wings and even race cars.

The article goes on to highlight a few products that are still in the prototype stages, like building blocks made from recycled PET and concrete bonding agents extracted from rice husks.

Back-peddling a little more, the article finds its way to university-level research, focusing on MIT. There, the author found interesting work on superhydrophobic coatings (Kripa Varanasi), genetic engineering of viruses to synthesize batteries (Angela Belcher) and computational discovery of new materials (Gerbrand Ceder, who first coined the term “materials genome”).

The article is clearly written by a non-scientist and is intended for non-scientists, too. But, it’s interesting to see how laymen translate our world into theirs.

The article appeared in the print April 21 issue, which had a series of articles on manufacturing and innovation.

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About 10 days ago, we reported that the BBC would be broadcasting a one-hour presentation on ceramic and glass science, but the broadcast would only be available to UK residents. The show, “Ceramics — How they work,” is the third part of a series that has covered plastics and metals.

The good news is that the BBC show has now been posted on YouTube. As we mentioned before, the program is narrated by Mark Miodownik, a professor specializing in materials science and engineering at University College London.

The BBC website offers this description of the ceramics program:

Miodownik’s three-part series on the materials that shaped the modern world ends with what you might think is a mundane subject. But in his hands, the stories  of how an 18th-century alchemist redeemed himself by cracking the secret Chinese recipe for porcelain, or how glass gradually became tougher and clearer, are vibrant.  Miodownik then applies his nicely judged mix of practical experiments, awestruck giggles and molecular animations to the present and the scintillating future: fibre-optics, super-conductors and modern architecture.

Mark Miodownik charts how mankind learned to use naturally occurring substances to create pottery, glass and concrete, and examines the ways these materials changed the world. He scientifically analyses the properties of ceramic materials, explaining why glass can be completely transparent and why concrete continues to harden for hundreds of years, and reveals the exciting and surprising roles that ceramics could play in the future.

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Process flow of preparing the vertically aligned single-walled CNTs-DSCs. Pre-etched VASWCNTs on silicon substrate (Process 1) were flipped on top of the FTO-glass, and then a force was loaded onside the silicon top. Credit: Feng Hao et al.; Nature Scientific Reports.

Check ‘em out:

NIST mini-sensor measures magnetic activity in human brain

A miniature atom-based magnetic sensor developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology has passed an important research milestone by successfully measuring human brain activity. Experiments reported this week verify the sensor’s potential for biomedical applications such as studying mental processes and advancing the understanding of neurological diseases. NIST and German scientists used the NIST sensor to measure alpha waves in the brain associated with a person opening and closing their eyes as well as signals resulting from stimulation of the hand. The measurements were verified by comparing them with signals recorded by a SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device). The chip-scale NIST sensor is about the size of a sugar cube and operates at room temperature, so it might enable lightweight and flexible MEG helmets. It also would be less expensive to mass produce than typical atomic magnetometers, which are larger and more difficult to fabricate and assemble. The mini-sensor consists of a container of about 100 billion rubidium atoms in a gas, a low-power infrared laser and fiber optics for detecting the light signals that register magnetic field strength-the atoms absorb more light as the magnetic field increases. The sensor has been improved since it was used to measure human heart activity in 2010. NIST scientists redesigned the heaters that vaporize the atoms and switched to a different type of optical fiber to enhance signal clarity.

House panel tops Senate mark for NSF

(Science) A House of Representatives spending panel wants to nearly match the president’s budget request for the National Science Foundation. A proposed $299 million increase in the agency’s 2013 budget would represent a 4.1% boost, to $7.332 billion. That’s even higher than the $240 million boost approved yesterday by the equivalent spending panel in the Senate, although it falls short of the $340 million sought by President Barack Obama. The House figure is expected to be voted on tomorrow morning by the commerce, justice, and science appropriations subcommittee chaired by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). The House mark would provide a $253 million increase for NSF’s six research directorates, just short of the $294 million boost that Obama requested, and a $46 million hike to NSF’s education directorate, which meets the president’s request. The major research facilities account would also receive the administration’s request of $196 million.

First atomic-scale real-time movies of platinum nanocrystal growth in liquids

They won’t be coming soon to a multiplex near you, but movies showing the growth of platinum nanocrystals at the atomic-scale in real-time have blockbuster potential. A team of scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley has developed a technique for encapsulating liquids of nanocrystals between layers of graphene so that chemical reactions in the liquids can be imaged with an electron microscope. With this technique, movies can be made that provide unprecedented direct observations of physical, chemical and biological phenomena that take place in liquids on the nanometer scale.

Low-cost solar cells from nanotube ‘forests’

By replacing platinum with carbon nanotubes, researchers hope to make efficient solar cells at a fraction of the current cost for silicon-based solar cells. Single-wall nanotube arrays, grown in a process invented at Rice University, are both much more electroactive and potentially cheaper than platinum, a common catalyst in dye-sensitized solar cells, says Jun Lou, a materials scientist at Rice. When combined with newly developed sulfide electrolytes synthesized at Tsinghua University, the work paves the way for a low-cost, efficient alternative to silicon-based cells. Lou and co-lead investigator Hong Lin, a professor of materials science and engineering at Tsinghua, detailed their work in the open-access Nature journal Scientific Reports. DSCs are easier to manufacture than silicon-based solid-state photovoltaic cells but not as efficient, explains Lou.

Materials under stress: A cracking twist

(NPG Asia Materials) Materials are prone to crack under stress - this can either cause materials failure or, when deliberately induced, offer a useful manufacturing step. In both situations, knowing how to control and predict how materials crack will help in their design and synthesis. Yet exerting control is difficult - for example, we have all seen pottery cracked along random directions. Yong Zhao and co-workers have now prepared core-shell fibres that undergo helical cracking at specific positions. A tough glass fibre was dip-coated with a brittle metal oxide film featuring regular spindle knots. On calcination, the thermal expansion undergone by the tough core does not match that of the brittle shell, creating longitudinal and circumferential stresses. The stress lines in turn cause the knots to crack into helical coils, whose shapes depend on the initial formation process. These findings represent a step forward along the way of controllable fracture.

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