Material Science News and Discussions

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Behold, Carbon-Free Steel Now Exists
HYBRIT, a partnership between a mining firm, an electric utility, and a steel company, made the world's first delivery of clean steel to Volvo.
ByDharna Noor

This week, a Swedish firm announced it had delivered carbon-free steel to a customer—a world-first. It’s a huge step in the race to clean up one of the most carbon-intensive activities on Earth.

On Wednesday, HYBRIT, a partnership between steel company SSAB, state-owned mining firm LKAB, and state-owned utility Vattenfall, said it delivered the clean steel to Swedish automaker Volvo. This was just a test run, but the firm plans to ramp up production to commercial scale by 2026.

“The first fossil-free steel in the world is not only a breakthrough for SSAB, it represents proof that it’s possible to make the transition and significantly reduce the global carbon footprint of the steel industry,” Martin Lindqvist, president and CEO of SSAB, said in a statement.

Making steel is notoriously difficult to decarbonize. The majority of production relies on coal as a raw material feedstock and also as a fuel. HYBRIT has been working to build out clean steel production since it was formed five years ago using renewable power to produce hydrogen and then combining it with iron ore to create a porous material called sponge iron. It began testing the process, which had only been proven at a laboratory scale, last year. This past June, the venture announced it had successfully used this process on a pilot scale. Volvo plans to experiment with the initial batch of green steel by making prototype vehicles and parts, according to the Guardian.

https://gizmodo.com/behold-carbon-free- ... 9h0H7UQA74

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New family of ferroelectric materials raises possibilities for improved information and energy storage
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-family-fe ... nergy.html
by Jamie Oberdick, Pennsylvania State University

Part of the process of creating ferroelectric magnesium-substituted zinc oxide thin films includes: (left) Image showing thin film being sputter-deposited from metal sources; (center) ferroelectric hysteresis loops of thin-film capacitors showing two remanent polarization states at zero field; (right) atomic force microscope image showing a smooth surface at the nanometer scale and a very fine-grained and fiber-textured microstructure. Credit: Materials Research Institute, Penn State

A new family of materials that could result in improved digital information storage and uses less energy may be possible thanks to a team of Penn State researchers who demonstrated ferroelectricity in magnesium-substituted zinc oxide.

Ferroelectric materials are spontaneous electricly polarized bcause negative and positive charges in the material tend toward opposite sides and with the application of an external electric field reorient. They can be affected by physical force, which is why they are useful for push-button ignitors such as those found in gas grills. They can also be used for data storage and memory, because they remain in one polarized state without additional power and so are low-energy digital storage solutions.

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Physicists engineer new property out of 'white' graphene
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-physicist ... phene.html
by Elizabeth A. Thomson, Materials Research Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ultrathin materials made of a single layer of atoms have riveted scientists' attention since the discovery of the first such material—graphene—about 17 years ago. Among other advances since then, researchers including those from a pioneering lab at MIT have found that stacking individual sheets of the 2D materials, and sometimes twisting them at a slight angle to each other, can give them new properties, from superconductivity to magnetism.

Now MIT physicists from the same lab and colleagues have done just that with boron nitride, known as "white graphene" in part because it has an atomic structure similar to its famous cousin. The team has shown that when two single sheets of boron nitride are stacked parallel to each other, the material becomes ferroelectric, in which positive and negative charges in the material spontaneously head to different sides, or poles. Upon the application of an external electric field, those charges switch sides, reversing the polarization. Importantly, all of this happens at room temperature.

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Inspired by metamorphosis, researchers create materials for shape-shifting architecture
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-metamorph ... cture.html
by Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed materials that can be used to create structures capable of transforming into multiple different architectures. The researchers envision applications ranging from construction to robotics.

"The system we've developed was inspired by metamorphosis," says Jie Yin, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. "With metamorphosis in nature, animals change their fundamental shape. We've created a class of materials that can be used to create structures that change their fundamental architecture."

Kirigami is a fundamental concept for Yin's work. Kirigami is a variation of origami that involves cutting and folding paper. But while kirigami traditionally uses two-dimensional materials, Yin applies the same principles to three-dimensional materials.

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New world record in materials research: X-ray microscopy at a speed of 1000 tomograms per second
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-world-mat ... grams.html
by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Most people are familiar with computed tomography from medicine: A part of the body is X-rayed from all sides and a three-dimensional image is then calculated, from which any sectional images can be created for diagnosis.

This method is also very useful for material analysis, non-destructive quality testing or in the development of new functional materials. However, to examine such materials with high spatial resolution and in the shortest possible time, the particularly intense X-ray light of a synchrotron radiation source is required. In the synchrotron beam, even rapid changes and processes in material samples can be imaged if it is possible to acquire 3-dimensional images in a very short time sequence.

From 200 to 1000 tomograms per second

An HZB team led by Dr. Francisco Garcia Moreno is working on this together with colleagues from the Swiss Light Source SLS at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland. Two years ago, they managed a record 200 tomograms per second, calling the method of fast imaging tomoscopy. Now the team has achieved a new world record: With a speed of 1000 tomograms per second, they can now record even faster processes in materials or during the manufacturing process. This is achieved without any major compromises in the other parameters: The spatial resolution is still very good at several micrometers, the field of view is several square millimeters and continuous recording periods of up to several minutes are possible.

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Researchers suggest a way to achieve net-zero emission plastics

by Bob Yirka, Science X Network, Phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-net-zero- ... stics.html

A team of researchers with members affiliated with institutions in Germany, Switzerland and the U.S. has created a model that they claim could be used to achieve net-zero-emission plastics by 2050. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group outlines their model and requirements for implementation.

A host of studies has shown that the production and use of plastics has become a significant environmental problem as it breaks down into microplastics, it makes its way into virtually every water source on the planet, resulting in health problems for organisms. Production of plastic is also a significant contributor to global warming due to the gasses emitted during manufacture. In this new effort, the researchers analyzed the data produced by over 400 research efforts aimed at solving the plastics problem and developed a model that they say could lead to a net-zero-emission-plastic world by 2050.

The model implements a cycle built around combining recycling of plastics with chemical reduction of the carbon dioxide they emit when they are burned or collected from biomass. They suggest a recycling rate as low as 70% would be sufficient to reach net-zero emissions, which would result in energy savings of 34 to 53%. They also suggest that the operational costs involved would be on a par with other carbon-capture processes. They further suggest that the cost savings associated with implementing their model globally would amount to approximately $288 billion annually. They point out that production of plastics now accounts for approximately 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and note that current forecasts suggest that the number could grow to 20% over the next 30 years if things continue as they are now. They conclude that the technology exists to solve the plastics problem—all that is needed to solve it is the will to do so.

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Enhancing piezoelectric properties under pressure
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-piezoelec ... ssure.html
by FLEET

Stress enhances the properties of a promising material for future technologies.

UNSW researchers have found a new exotic state of one of the most promising multiferroic materials, with exciting implications for future technologies using these enhanced properties.

Combining a careful balance of thin-film strain, distortion and thickness, the team has stabilized a new intermediate phase in one of the few known room-temperature multiferroic materials.

The theoretical and experimental U.S.-Australian study shows that this new phase has an electromechanical figure of merit over double its usual value, and that we can even transform between this intermediate phase to other phases easily using an electric field.

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Ultrafast control of quantum materials
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-ultrafast ... rials.html
by Paul Scherrer Institute

An international team with participation of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI shows how light can fundamentally change the properties of solids and how these effects can be used for future applications. The researchers summarize their progress in this field, which is based among other things on experiments that can also be carried out at the Swiss X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL, in the scientific journal Reviews of Modern Physics.

The researchers explore how light can fundamentally alter the properties of solids—and how these effects can be harnessed in future applications. The review on the latest developments in ultrafast materials science is both meant as a guide for graduate students entering the field as well as a standard reference for the community. In addition to PSI researcher Simon Gerber, it was written by MPSD group leaders James McIver and Michael Sentef as well as Dante Kennes from RWTH Aachen University, Alberto de la Torre (Brown University, U.S.) and Martin Claasen (University of Pennsylvania, U.S.). The team discusses experiments and theoretical ideas for how solids react to excitations with short laser pulses or the coupling of light and matter during irradiation with light.

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Researchers develop self-healing polymers for cracked cellphone screens
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-self-heal ... reens.html
by Elisabeth Faure, Concordia University

If you're like most cellphone users, at one point you have experienced a cracked screen.

This pesky problem can be frustrating to live with, and it's pricey to fix.

Two Concordia researchers from the Oh Research Group in the Faculty of Arts and Science are looking at ways to "self-heal" your cellphone, and their research could have broader implications as well.

Turning down the heat

"One of the major difficulties in these types of projects is to maintain a balance between the mechanical and self-healing properties," explains Ph.D. candidate Twinkal Patel (BSc 17), first author on the paper "Self-Healable Reprocessable Triboelectric Nanogenerators Fabricated with Vitrimeric Poly(hindered Urea) Networks," published in ACS Nano.

Patel says this research stands out from similar work on the topic because of its focus on temperature.

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Nanotwinned titanium forges path to sustainable manufacturing
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-nanotwinn ... nable.html
by Julie Fornaciari, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Titanium is strong and lightweight, boasting the highest strength to weight ratio of any structural metal. But processing it while maintaining a good balance of strength and ductility—the ability of a metal to be drawn out without breaking—is challenging and expensive. As a result, titanium has been relegated to niche uses in select industries.

Now, as reported in a recent study published in the journal Science, researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a new and practical path forward.

The team found that they could use a technique called cryo-forging to manipulate pure titanium on the scale of a billionth of a meter (a nanometer) at ultra-low temperatures to produce extra-strong "nanotwinned" titanium without sacrificing any of its ductility.

"This study is the first time someone has produced a pure nanotwinned structure in bulk material," said Andrew Minor, the study's project lead and director of the National Center for Electron at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility at Berkeley Lab. "With nanotwinned titanium, we no longer have to choose between strength and ductility but instead can achieve both."

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Healable carbon fiber composite offers path to long-lasting, sustainable materials
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-healable- ... -path.html
by Andy Freeberg, University of Washington

Because of their high strength and light weight, carbon-fiber-based composite materials are gradually replacing metals for advancing all kinds of products and applications, from airplanes to wind turbines to golf clubs. But there's a trade-off. Once damaged or compromised, the most commonly-used carbon fiber materials are nearly impossible to repair or recycle.

In a paper posted this week in the journal Carbon, a research team that includes UW mechanical engineering Assistant Professor Aniruddh Vashisth describes a new type of carbon fiber reinforced material that is as strong and light as traditionally used ones but can be repeatedly healed with heat, reversing any fatigue damage and providing a way to break it down and recycle it when it reaches the end of its life.

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Quicker, more precise way to find metallic glasses

by Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-quicker-p ... asses.html

Metallic glasses are being developed for a broad range of applications. The relatively new material is stronger than even the best metals, but with the pliability of plastic.

However, finding the right elements to make metallic glasses has proven a time-consuming task. A team of researchers, including Jan Schroers, professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, has devised a way to dramatically reduce the amount of time that it takes. Their results are published in Nature Materials.

Metallic glasses owe their properties to their unique atomic structures: when metallic glasses cool from a liquid to a solid, their atoms settle into a random arrangement and do not crystallize the way traditional metals do. But the glass-forming ability (GFA)—that is, how easy a metal or alloy can be turned into a glass—is complex and poorly understood. And trying to quantify the GFA of a material has been experimentally elaborate and computationally challenging. As a consequence, the ideal combination of properties has been found in only a few alloys, and current use of metallic glass is limited to highly specialized applications. To unleash their potential, a much wider range of alloys must be characterized.

The team of researchers has devised a method that takes much of the time and the trial-and-error out of the process. They found that with conventional X-ray diffraction, they could figure out how readily an alloy can be converted to glass. For the study, they processed about 5,700 X-ray diffraction patterns from 12 alloy systems—an unprecedented amount of experimental data, both in quantity and in consistent quality.

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Polymer discovery gives 3D-printed sand super strength
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-polymer-d ... super.html
by Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed a novel polymer to bind and strengthen silica sand for binder jet additive manufacturing, a 3D-printing method used by industries for prototyping and part production.

The printable polymer enables sand structures with intricate geometries and exceptional strength—and is also water soluble.

The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates a 3D-printed sand bridge that at 6.5 centimeters can hold 300 times its own weight, a feat analogous to 12 Empire State Buildings sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The binder jet printing process is cheaper and faster than other 3D-printing methods used by industry and makes it possible to create 3D structures from a variety of powdered materials, offering advantages in cost and scalability. The concept stems from inkjet printing, but instead of using ink, the printer head jets out a liquid polymer to bind a powdered material, such as sand, building up a 3D design layer by layer. The binding polymer is what gives the printed sand its strength.

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Synthetic biology yields easy-to-use underwater adhesives
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-synthetic ... water.html
by Brandie Jefferson, Washington University in St. Louis

Several marine organisms, such as mussels, secrete adhesive proteins that allow them to stick to different surfaces under sea water. This attractive underwater adhesion property has inspired decades of research to create biomimetic glues for underwater repair or biological tissue repair. However, existing glues often do not have the desirable adhesion, are hard to use underwater, or are not biocompatible for medical applications. Now, there is a solution from synthetic biology.

Researchers a the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a method that uses engineered microbes to produce the necessary ingredients for a biocompatible adhesive hydrogel that is as strong as spider silk and as adhesive as mussel foot protein (Mfp), which means it can stick to a myriad of surfaces underwater.

The research led by Fuzhong Zhang, professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering, was published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

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‘Super jelly’ can survive being run over by a car

25 Nov 2021

Researchers have developed a jelly-like material that can withstand the equivalent of an elephant standing on it, and completely recover to its original shape, even though it’s 80% water.

The soft-yet-strong material, developed by a team at the University of Cambridge, looks and feels like a squishy jelly, but acts like an ultra-hard, shatterproof glass when compressed, despite its high water content.

The non-water portion of the material is a network of polymers held together by reversible on/off interactions that control the material’s mechanical properties. This is the first time that such significant resistance to compression has been incorporated into a soft material.

The ‘super jelly’ could be used for a wide range of potential applications, including soft robotics, bioelectronics or even as a cartilage replacement for biomedical use. The results are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/sup ... r-by-a-car

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Novel chemical design makes hard crystals stretchy
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-chemical- ... etchy.html
by Dartmouth College

Researchers have discovered a new way to make crystals stretchy, a modification that could enable them to act as very effective nanofilters.

"Picture a diamond that behaves like a rubber band," says Assistant Professor of Chemistry Chenfeng Ke. His research team has designed a new type of porous, carbon-based crystals that can stretch to more than twice their length.

Known to chemists as porous organic frameworks, these materials are typically hard. They are built from a scaffold of lightweight organic molecules like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Additional molecular crosslinks are chemically stitched in to strengthen the structure. Their structures resemble open nets full of voids, or pores, that can house a variety of molecules as guests. This allows them to act as filters that can remove certain pollutants from air and water, or separate and store commercially important chemicals. The size of the pores usually determines which molecules can be absorbed and stored.

By tweaking the design of the molecular building blocks, the researchers have now made it possible for specific chemicals to make the crystal expand. It's as if some molecules have a key that can unlock a whole lot of extra space that they can now occupy, says Jayanta Samanta, a research associate in the Ke Functional Materials Group.

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Plant-based component could boost bacterial production of biodegradable plastic
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-plant-bas ... ction.html
by Scott Schrage, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Given that less than 10 percent of synthetic plastics are recycled, the petroleum-derived, non-biodegradable materials continue to accumulate across the planet, covering stretches of land and the ocean floor. Microplastics have been found 29,000 feet above sea level, on the peak of Mount Everest, and 36,000 feet below it, in the depths of the Mariana Trench.

Some bacteria produce biodegradable plastics when deprived of nutrients or otherwise stressed, positioning them as part of a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Unfortunately, the cost of feeding and maintaining those microbes has impeded efforts to scale up their production of biodegradable plastics. So researchers have set out to engineer microbes that yield bioplastics—especially poly-3-hydroxybutyrate, or PHB—faster, more efficiently and from renewable feedstocks.

Nebraska's Rajib Saha and colleagues have been studying the species Rhodopseudomonas palustris for secrets to engineering a better bacterium. Their recent experiments generated a bevy of important findings. Among them? A component of decomposed lignin—a polymer found in the cell walls of nearly all land-based plants—can substantially boost R. palustris production of PHB plastic.

To better understand why, the team turned to a model that maps the metabolic processes responsible for turning feedstocks into various products, including bioplastics. That model helped reveal multiple strategies for optimizing PHB production, from bypassing a biochemical reaction that normally acts as a bottleneck to growing the microbes on surfaces abundant in electrons and carbon atoms.

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New atomically thin material could improve efficiency of light-based tech
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-atomicall ... based.html
by Melissa Pappas, University of Pennsylvania

Solar panels, cameras, biosensors and fiber optics are technologies that rely on photodetectors, or sensors that convert light into electricity. Photodetectors are becoming more efficient and affordable, with their component semiconductor chips decreasing in size. However, this miniaturization is pushing against limits set by current materials and manufacturing methods, forcing trade-offs between size and performance.

There are many limitations of the traditional semiconductor chip manufacturing process. The chips are created by growing the semiconductor film over the top of a wafer in a way where the film's crystalline structure is in alignment with that of the substrate wafer. This makes it difficult to transfer the film to other substrate materials, reducing its applicability.

Additionally, the current method of transferring and stacking these films is done through mechanical exfoliation, a process where a piece of tape pulls off the semiconductor film and then transfers it to a new substrate, layer by layer. This process results in multiple non-uniform layers stacked upon one another with each layer's imperfections accumulated in the whole. This process affects the quality of the product as well as limits the reproducibility and scalability of these chips.

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New technique tunes into graphene nanoribbons' electronic potential
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-technique ... ronic.html
by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Ever since graphene—a thin carbon sheet just one-atom thick—was discovered more than 15 years ago, the wonder material became a workhorse in materials science research. From this body of work, other researchers learned that slicing graphene along the edge of its honeycomb lattice creates one-dimensional zigzag graphene strips or nanoribbons with exotic magnetic properties.

Many researchers have sought to harness nanoribbons' unusual magnetic behavior into carbon-based, spintronics devices that enable high-speed, low-power data storage and information processing technologies by encoding data through electron spin instead of charge. But because zigzag nanoribbons are highly reactive, researchers have grappled with how to observe and channel their exotic properties into a real-world device.

Now, as reported in the Dec. 22 issue of the journal Nature, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have developed a method to stabilize the edges of graphene nanoribbons and directly measure their unique magnetic properties.

The team co-led by Felix Fischer and Steven Louie, both faculty scientists in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, found that by substituting some of the carbon atoms along the ribbon's zigzag edges with nitrogen atoms, they could discretely tune the local electronic structure without disrupting the magnetic properties. This subtle structural change further enabled the development of a scanning probe microscopy technique for measuring the material's local magnetism at the atomic scale.

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Sustainable silk material for biomedical, optical, food supply applications
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-sustainab ... tical.html
by American Institute of Physics

While silk is best known as a component in clothes and fabric, the material has plentiful uses, spanning biomedicine to environmental science. In Applied Physics Reviews, researchers from Tufts University discuss the properties of silk and recent and future applications of the material.

Silk makes an important biomaterial, because it does not generate an immune response in humans and promotes the growth of cells. It has been used in drug delivery, and because the material is flexible and has favorable technological properties, it is ideal for wearable and implantable health monitoring sensors.

As an optically transparent and easily manipulated material at the nano- and microscale, silk is also useful in optics and electronics. It is used to develop diffractive optics, photonic crystals, and waveguides, among other devices.

More recently, silk has come to the forefront of sustainability research. The material is made in nature and can be reprocessed from recycled or discarded clothing and other textiles. The use of silk coatings may also reduce food waste, which is a significant component of the global carbon footprint.