As tons of plastic waste continue to build up in landfills every day, Yale researchers have developed a way to convert this waste into fuels and other valuable products efficiently and cheaply. The results are published in Nature Chemical Engineering.
Specifically, the researchers are using a method known as pyrolysis, a process of using heat in the absence of oxygen to molecularly break materials down. In this case, it’s used to break plastics down to the components that produce fuels and other products. The study was led by Yale Engineering professors Liangbing Hu and Shu Hu, both members of the Center for Materials Innovation and Yale Energy Sciences Institute.
Conventional methods of pyrolysis often use a catalyst to speed up the chemical reactions and achieve a high yield, but it’s a method that comes with significant limitations.
Crystals and glasses have opposite heat-conduction properties, which play a pivotal role in a variety of technologies. These range from the miniaturization and efficiency of electronic devices to waste-heat recovery systems, as well as the lifespan of thermal shields for aerospace applications.
The problem of optimizing the performance and durability of materials used in these different applications essentially boils down to fundamentally understanding how their chemical composition and atomic structure (e.g., crystalline, glassy, nanostructured) determine their capability to conduct heat. Michele Simoncelli, assistant professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia Engineering, tackles this problem from first principles — i.e., in Aristotle’s words, in terms of “the first basis from which a thing is known” — starting from the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics and leveraging machine-learning techniques to solve them with quantitative accuracy.
In research published on July 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Simoncelli and his collaborators Nicola Marzari from the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne and Francesco Mauri from Sapienza University of Rome predicted the existence of a material with hybrid crystal-glass thermal properties, and a team of experimentalists led by Etienne Balan, Daniele Fournier, and Massimiliano Marangolo from the Sorbonne University in Paris confirmed it with measurements.
The optical crystal can survive extreme temperatures and cosmic radiation, is nigh-impervious to physical impact, resists most chemicals, and can endure for billions of years.
Scientists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have uncovered a critical molecular cause keeping aqueous rechargeable batteries from becoming a safer, economical option for sustainable energy storage.
Their findings, published in Science Advances, reveal how water compromises battery life and performance and how the addition of affordable salts—such as zinc sulfate—mitigates this issue, even increasing the battery lifespan by more than ten times.
One of the key determinants of the lifespan of a battery—aqueous or otherwise—is the anode. Chemical reactions at the anode generate and store the battery’s energy. However, parasitic chemical reactions degrade the anode, compromising the battery lifespan.
Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have created the world’s simplest artificial cell capable of chemical navigation, migrating toward specific substances like living cells do.
This breakthrough, published in Science Advances, demonstrates how microscopic bubbles can be programmed to follow chemical trails. The study describes the development of a “minimal cell” in the form of a lipid vesicle encapsulating enzymes that can propel itself through chemotaxis.
Cellular transport is a vital aspect of many biological processes and a key milestone in evolution. Among all types of movement, chemotaxis is an essential strategy used by many living systems to move towards beneficial signals, such as nutrients, or away from harmful ones.
A virus that typically infects black-eyed peas is showing great promise as a low-cost, potent cancer immunotherapy—and researchers are uncovering why.
In a study published in Cell Biomaterials, a team led by chemical and nano engineers at the University of California San Diego took a closer look at how the cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV), unlike other plant viruses, is uniquely effective at activating the body’s immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells.
The study is titled “Comparative analyses for plant virus-based cancer immunotherapy drug development.”
