[Images above] Credit: NIST
ENERGY
Probing lithium ions near a solid’s surface reveals clues to boost battery performance
An international team of researchers, including nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego, uncovered nanoscale changes inside solid-state batteries that could offer new insights into improving battery performance. They analyzed the batteries by combining X-ray adsorption spectroscopy and second harmonic generation.
Breakthrough in waste heat to green energy: Materials boost record efficiency
Researchers at The Pennsylvania State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a unique materials design that can push the conversion efficiency of thermoelectric devices up to 15%. Current commercial devices boast 5–6% efficiency.
ENVIRONMENT
New chemistry can extract virgin-grade materials from wind turbine blades in one process
Aarhus University researchers, together with the Danish Technological Institute, filed a patent application for a new chemical process that can disassemble the epoxy composite of wind turbine blades and simultaneously extract intact glass fibers, as well as one of the epoxy resin’s original building blocks, in a high quality.
MANUFACTURING
Engineers ‘grow’ atomically thin transistors on top of computer chips
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers developed a low-temperature growth process to effectively and efficiently “grow” layers of 2D transition metal dichalcogenide materials directly on top of a fully fabricated silicon chip to enable denser integrations.
OTHER STORIES
A sapphire Schrödinger’s cat shows that quantum effects can scale up
Scientists put a jiggling piece of sapphire crystal in what’s known as a “cat state,” in which an object exists in two different states simultaneously. The new sapphire cat is a relatively hefty 16 micrograms, or approximately half the mass of an eyelash, which makes it more than 100 trillion times the mass of cat states previously created with molecules.
Researchers team up with national lab for innovative look at copper reactions
Binghamton University researchers partnered with Brookhaven National Laboratory to get a better look at how peroxides on the surface of copper oxide promote the oxidation of hydrogen but inhibit the oxidation of carbon monoxide. They observed these quick changes with two complementary spectroscopy methods.
Deep-learning system explores materials’ interiors from the outside
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers used deep learning to make reliable predictions about the interior of a material from its surface data. They trained the model using vast amounts of data about surface measurements and the interior properties associated with them.
Better understanding soft material behavior
Researchers led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used a high-powered microscopy technique called rheo- X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy to study flow-dependent structure–property relationships in soft colloidal glass in real time.