Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: engineering – Page 86

Improving crystal engineering with DNA

Northwestern investigators have demonstrated that fine-tuning DNA interaction strength can improve colloidal crystal engineering to enhance their use in creating an array of functional nanomaterials, according to a recent study published in ACS Nano.

Chad Mirkin, Ph.D., professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology, was senior author of the study.

Colloidal crystal engineering with DNA involves modifying nanoparticles into programmable atom equivalents, or “PAEs,” which are used to form that can then be used for designing programmable, synthetic DNA sequences.

He likes to be, under the sea: Florida man sets record for living underwater

But Dituri isn’t just settling for the record and resurfacing: He plans to stay at the lodge until June 9, when he reaches 100 days and completes an underwater mission dubbed Project Neptune 100.

The mission combines medical and ocean research along with educational outreach and was organized by the Marine Resources Development Foundation, owner of the habitat.

“The record is a small bump and I really appreciate it,” said Dituri, a University of South Florida educator who holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering and is a retired U.S. Naval officer. “I’m honored to have it, but we still have more science to do.”

New material facilitates search for room-temperature superconductivity

Scientists from Jilin University, the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research, and Skoltech have synthesized lanthanum-cerium polyhydride, a material that promises to facilitate studies of near-room-temperature superconductivity. It offers a compromise between the polyhydrides of lanthanum and cerium in terms of how much cooling and pressure it requires. This enables easier experiments, which might one day lead scientists to compounds that conduct electricity with zero resistance at ambient conditions—an engineering dream many years in the making. The study was published in Nature Communications.

One of the most intriguing unsolved questions in modern physics is: Can we make a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance (superconducts) at and ? Such a superconductor would enable power grids with unprecedented efficiency, ultrafast microchips, and electromagnets so powerful they could levitate trains or control fusion reactors.

In their search, scientists are probing multiple classes of materials, slowly nudging up the temperature they superconduct at and decreasing the they require to remain stable. One such group of materials is polyhydrides—compounds with extremely high hydrogen content. At −23°C, the current champion for is a lanthanum polyhydride with the formula LaH10. The trade-off: It requires the pressure of 1.5 million atmospheres. At the opposite end of the spectrum, cuprates are a class of materials that superconduct under normal atmospheric pressure but require —no more than −140°.

Can We Live Longer than 120? Lecture

Never heard of this fellow before but if you have a spare 50 minutes it’s a good listen. A summary of aging and what we might do about it with the goal (after about 26 minutes) of making an aging vaccine.

Lecture given by Dr. Ronjon Nag at “The Peter Wells Memorial Lecture 2023″ which took place in London on May 3rd, 2023.
https://events.theiet.org/events/the-peter-wells-memorial-lecture-2023/

The event was hosted by the Biomedical Engineering Joint Steering Group of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
https://engx.theiet.org/technical-networks/biomedeng

Integrated solar combined cycle system with steam methane reforming: Thermodynamic analysis

A transition to a carbon-free economy is the reality of the modern energy industry. Reduction in CO2 emission is one of the main challenge in energy engineering in the last decades. Renewable energy sources are playing an important role on the way to a zero-carbon economy [1,2]. Solar energy is one of the main and almost unlimited energy sources in the World. The different technologies of solar energy use have been developed in the last years [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]]. However, even though the progress in the development of solar energy technologies is notable, there are a lot of challenges for energy science. One of them is the fact that more than 60% of electricity is produced by conventional technologies via hydrocarbon fuel combustion: steam turbines, gas turbines, etc. While the share of electricity produced by using solar energy is no more than a few percent [9].

Among various ways of utilization of solar energy for electricity generation, a combination of solar energy with the traditional steam and gas turbine cycles can be highlighted. The power plants where solar energy is combined with conventional power cycles are named integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS). In these systems, solar energy is used to produce heat and after that heat is used to generate mechanical work or electricity.

Combined cycle power plants (CCPP) show one of the highest energy efficiency among conventional power plants [10]. The modern cycles with high-temperature gas turbines have an efficiency up to 70% and even higher. In such cycles, the high-temperature gas turbines with the turbine inlet temperature (TIT) up to 1,600 °C are applied [11,12]. In the last years, a lot of various integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS) were developed by various scientists and engineers. The main way to use solar energy in such cycles is a steam generation in CCPP [[13], [14], [15], [16]]. In other words, solar energy in such ISCCS is utilized as an energy source in a steam turbine cycle.

A new twist on chirality: Researchers extend the concept of directionality and propose a new class of materials

It is often desirable to restrict flows—whether of sound, electricity, or heat—to one direction, but naturally occurring systems almost never allow this. However, unidirectional flow can indeed be engineered under certain conditions, and the resulting systems are said to exhibit chiral behavior.

The concept of chirality is traditionally limited to single direction flows in one dimension. In 2021, however, researchers working with Taylor Hughes, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, introduced a theoretical extension that can account for more intricate chiral flows in two dimensions.

Now, a team led by Hughes and Gaurav Bahl, a UIUC professor of mechanical science & engineering, has experimentally realized this extension. As the researchers reported in Nature Communications, they constructed a topological circuit network, a system of electronics that simulates the microscopic behavior of quantum materials, to explore the entirely new behaviors predicted by this extended, or higher-rank chirality.

Metamaterial Concrete: Reinventing the Most Widely Used Construction Material

Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh are bringing concrete into the 21st century by reimagining its design. Concrete, which has its roots dating back to the Roman Empire, remains the most widely utilized material in the construction industry.

A new study presents a concept for the development of smart civil infrastructure systems with the introduction of metamaterial concrete. The research presents a concept for lightweight and mechanically-tunable concrete systems with integrated energy harvesting and sensing capabilities.

“Modern society has been using concrete in construction for hundreds of years, following its original creation by the ancient Romans,” said Amir Alavi, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Pitt, who is the corresponding author on the study. “Massive use of concrete in our infrastructure projects implies the need for developing a new generation of concrete materials that are more economical and environmentally sustainable, yet offer advanced functionalities. We believe that we can achieve all of these goals by introducing a metamaterial paradigm into the development of construction materials.”

MIT Engineers Revolutionize Semiconductor Chip Technology With Atom-Thin Transistors

A new low-temperature growth and fabrication technology allows the integration of 2D materials directly onto a silicon circuit, which could lead to denser and more powerful chips.

Researchers from MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

Quantum lidar prototype acquires real-time 3D images while fully submerged underwater

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated a prototype lidar system that uses quantum detection technology to acquire 3D images while submerged underwater. The high sensitivity of this system could allow it to capture detailed information even in extremely low-light conditions found underwater.

“This technology could be useful for a wide range of applications,” said research team member Aurora Maccarone, a Royal Academy of Engineering research fellow from Heriot-Watt University in the United Kingdom. “For example, it could be used to inspect underwater installations, such as underwater wind farm cables and the submerged structure of the turbines. Underwater can also be used for monitoring or surveying submerged archaeology sites and for security and defense applications.”

Obtaining 3D images through can be challenging because it is light-limited, and any particles in the water will scatter light and distort the image. However, single-photon detection, which is a quantum-based technique, allows very high penetration and works even in low-light conditions.

Molecular Magic — Researchers Develop Lightweight 2D Material Stronger Than Steel

2D materials, which are finer than even the thinnest onionskin paper, have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable mechanical attributes. However, these properties dissapate when the materials are layered, thus restricting their practical applications.

“Think of a graphite pencil,” says Teng Li, Keystone Professor at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Its core is made of graphite, and graphite is composed of many layers of graphene.

Graphene is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a single layer of atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each vertex. It is the basic structural element of other allotropes of carbon, including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes. In proportion to its thickness, it is about 100 times stronger than the strongest steel.