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Category: materials – Page 4

Electrical flash method rapidly purifies red mud into strong ceramics, aluminum feedstock

A team of researchers at Rice University has developed a faster and cleaner method for recovering aluminum and removing toxic metals from bauxite residue, or red mud, which is a hazardous by-product of aluminum production.

This new technique, published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, involves a brief electrical pulse lasting under one minute, along with a small amount of chlorine gas. If implemented on a larger scale, it could revolutionize global waste management and materials recovery.

The process uses flash joule heating (FJH), which rapidly heats materials with a short, high-power electrical pulse to vaporize harmful metals, leaving behind a residue rich in aluminum. This aluminum-rich material can then be repurposed into durable ceramic tiles or bricks or resubjected to the normal aluminum production process. The method offers a practical and scalable solution to address a significant pollution problem by transforming it into valuable materials, marking an advancement in industrial waste recovery.

Supercapacitor outperforms batteries in power delivery

Engineers in Australia have created a new carbon-based material which allows supercapacitors to store as much energy as traditional lead-acid batteries and deliver charge much faster.

The new graphene materials are now being made in commercial quantities, says Dr Phillip Aitchison, chief technical officer of Monash University spinout Ionic Industries.

“We’re working with energy storage partners to bring this breakthrough to market-led applications – where both high energy and fast power delivery are essential.”

Ant swarm simulation unlocks possibilities in materials engineering, robot navigation and traffic control

Think twice about eliminating those pesky ants at your next family picnic. Their behavior may hold the key to reinventing how engineering materials, traffic control and multi-agent robots are made and utilized, thanks to research conducted by recent graduate Matthew Loges and Assistant Professor Tomer Weiss from NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing.

The two earned a best presentation award for their research paper titled “Simulating Ant Swarm Aggregations Dynamics” at the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium for Computer Animation (SCA), and a qualifying poster nomination for the undergraduate research competition at the 2025 ACM SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) conference.

Their study began with the observation that ant swarms behave in a manner similar to both fluid and . The duo began work in the summer of 2024. Loges became interested in research after he took an elective class with Weiss, IT 360 Computer Graphics for Visual Effects, at the Department of Informatics. This was his first project and research paper.

Ultrafast infrared light pulses trigger rapid ‘breathing’ in thin film

Cornell Engineering researchers have demonstrated that, by zapping a synthetic thin film with ultrafast pulses of low-frequency infrared light, they can cause its lattice to atomically expand and contract billions of times per second—strain-driven “breathing” that could potentially be harnessed to quickly switch a material’s electronic, magnetic or optical properties on and off.

The research was published in Physical Review Letters. The paper’s co-lead authors are former postdoctoral researcher Jakob Gollwitzer and doctoral student Jeffrey Kaaret.

Stretching and squishing a material to induce strain is a common method to manipulate its properties, but using light for that purpose has been less studied, according to Nicole Benedek, associate professor of materials science and engineering, who co-led the project with Andrej Singer, associate professor of materials science and engineering in Cornell Engineering.

Electrons that act like photons reveal a quantum secret

Quantum materials, defined by their photon-like electrons, are opening new frontiers in material science. Researchers have synthesized organic compounds that display a universal magnetic behavior tied to a distinctive feature in their band structures called linear band dispersion. This discovery not only deepens the theoretical understanding of quantum systems but also points toward revolutionary applications in next-generation information and communication technologies that conventional materials cannot achieve.

Machine learning for materials discovery and optimization

This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 9 — Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure.

Discovering new materials with customizable and optimized properties, driven either by specific application needs or by fundamental scientific interest, is a primary goal of materials science. Conventionally, the search for new materials is a lengthy and expensive manual process, frequently based on trial and error, requiring the synthesis and characterization of many compositions before a desired material can be found. In recent years this process has been greatly improved by a combination of artificial intelligence and high-throughput approaches. Advances in machine learning for materials science, data-driven materials prediction, autonomous synthesis and characterization, and data-guided high-throughput exploration, can now significantly accelerate materials discovery.

This Collection brings together the latest computational and experimental advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data-driven approaches to accelerate high-throughput prediction, synthesis, characterization, optimization, discovery, and understanding of new materials.

Trilayer moiré superlattices unlock tunable control of exciton configurations

Moiré superlattices are periodic patterns formed when two or more thin semiconducting layers are stacked with a small twist angle or lattice mismatch. When 2D materials form these patterns, their electronic, mechanical, and optical properties can change significantly.

Over the past decades, moiré superlattices have emerged as a promising platform to study unconventional and unknown physical states. They also enabled the observation of unique excitonic configurations (i.e., arrangements of bound electron-hole pairs).

In bilayer moiré systems based on two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), for instance, physicists have observed interlayer dipolar excitons. These are excitons produced when an electron and a hole are bound together across different layers in a stacked 2D semiconductor.

Tests on superconducting materials for world’s largest fusion energy project show reliable measurement protocol

Durham University scientists have completed one of the largest quality verification programs ever carried out on superconducting materials, helping to ensure the success of the world’s biggest fusion energy experiment ITER.

Their findings, published in Superconductor Science and Technology, shed light not only on the quality of the wires themselves but also on how to best test them, providing crucial knowledge for scientists to make a reality.

Fusion (the process that powers the sun) has long been described as the holy grail of clean energy. It offers the promise of a virtually limitless power source with no carbon emissions and minimal radioactive waste.

Chinese researchers on Tuesday unveiled their self-developed world’s first “bone glue”

Material capable of securely bonding fractured bone fragments within 2–3 minutes in a blood-rich environment.

ในช่วงไม่กี่ปีที่ผ่านมา จีนได้แสดงศักยภาพด้านวิทยาศาสตร์การแพทย์อย่างต่อเนื่อง หนึ่งในผลงานที่ได้รับความสนใจระดับโลกคือการพัฒนาวัสดุชีวภาพชนิดใหม่ที่เรียกว่ากาวกระดูก (Bine Glue) ที่สามารถเชื่อมกระดูกที่หักให้ติดกันได้ภายในระยะเวลาเพียง 3 นาที

Isotopic analysis determines that water once flowed on asteroid Ryugu

A team of researchers, including those at the University of Tokyo, discovered that liquid water once flowed on the asteroid that spawned near-Earth asteroid Ryugu more than a billion years after it first formed. The finding, based on tiny rock fragments returned by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), overturns long-held assumptions that water activity on asteroids only occurred in the earliest moments of solar system history. This could impact current models, including those describing the formation of Earth.

We have a relatively good understanding of how the solar system formed, but of course there are many gaps. One such gap in our knowledge is how Earth came to possess so much water. It’s long been known that so-called carbonaceous asteroids like Ryugu formed from ice and dust in the outer solar system supplied water to Earth.

Ryugu was famously visited by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2018, the first visit of its kind, where not only were in-situ data collected, but small samples of material were brought back to Earth too. And it’s thanks to this endeavor that researchers can help fill in some missing details in the picture of our creation.

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