Originally scheduled to take place in 2021, the Unified International Technical Conference on Refractories took place March 15–18, 2022, in Chicago, Ill. People from 28 countries gathered to attend the hybrid conference, which featured much discussion of challenges and opportunities resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
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For decades researchers have categorized energy storage devices based on whether they behave like a battery or a supercapacitor. An international research team argues that energy storage mechanisms should be viewed as existing on a spectrum instead and that the current binary classification system could hamper development of new technologies.
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Şişecam expands its production footprint in Europe, GE eyes offshore wind turbines with superconducting generator, and more ceramic and glass business news of the week for March 21, 2022.
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Recycling and reusing waste materials is one approach the refractories industry is pursuing to improve sustainability. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics have explored the potential of electrodynamic fragmentation to recycle composites, and their recent study looks specifically at the potential of this technique applied to refractory materials.
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The April 2022 issue of the ACerS Bulletin—featuring ferroelectric materials for negative capacitance electronics—is now available online. Plus—new C&GM.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine is contributing to an ongoing surge in fuel prices that has greatly affected numerous European industries since last fall. Last November we reported on challenges faced by the ceramics industry, and today we look at the struggles of Venice glassblowers to keep their centuries-old tradition alive.
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Friction in multilayered graphene, convert plastic waste into porous carbon, and other materials stories that may be of interest for March 16, 2022.
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Cleaning solar panels currently is estimated to use about 10 billion gallons of water per year—enough to supply drinking water for up to 2 million people. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed a waterless approach for dust removal from solar panels using electrostatic induction.
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SCHOTT and Hungarian government invest in cutting-edge syringe production, Ford will split into EV and combustion divisions, and more ceramic and glass business news of the week for March 14, 2022.
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Historical research on the trade of metal supplies and objects often overshadows studies on the practices, recipes, and supplies of clays used by metallurgists of the time. Researchers in Belgium and France characterized metallurgical ceramic samples from the remains of a Late Medieval Period foundry in Brussels and found the analyses, in conjunction with written sources, highlight the mobility of clay materials, not just metal.
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