Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Designer atoms and super magnets!

The future of manufacturing depends on a number of technological breakthroughs in robotics, sensors and high-performance computing, to name a few. But nothing will impact how things are made, and what they are capable of, more than the materials manufacturers use to make those things. New materials change both the manufacturing process and the end result. Scientific American has come up with a line up of exciting inventions. Many of them are relevant to the field of energy.

Carmakers, for example, are developing porous polymers and new steel alloys that are stronger and lighter than steel, ostensibly making vehicles both safer and more fuel efficient. And environmentally savvy entrepreneurs are growing fungi-based packing materials to provide a biodegradable alternative to Styrofoam. The Mushroom Packaging from agricultural crop waste—plant stalks and rice and wheat husks—bonded together with mushroom roots (called mycelium) is a biodegradable alternative to petroleum-based plastic foams used in automotive bumpers, doors, roofs, engine bays, trunk liners, dashboards and seats.

Northwestern University and Michigan State University scientists have demonstrated a thermoelectric material that is highly efficient at converting waste heat to electricity. The inefficiency of existing thermoelectric materials has limited their commercial use. The record-setting, environmentally stable formulation is expected to convert 15 to 20 percent of waste heat to useful electricity, enabling greater industrial adoption. Waste-heat recovery systems could be attached, for example, to vehicle tailpipes or could process the exhaust streams from glass- and brick-making factories, refineries, fossil-fuel power plants as well as large transport ships and tankers.

Three University of Chicago chemists have created a new way to assemble what they call “designer atoms” into novel materials with a broad array of potentially useful properties and functions. These designer atoms are nano crystals—tiny crystalline arrays small enough that new quantum phenomena begin to emerge but large enough to provide building blocks for new functional materials and substances that could be useful in harvesting solar energy and delivering quantum computing. Whereas electric motors use magnets to transform electrical energy into mechanical energy, sintered rare earth magnets produce incredibly strong magnetic fields at small sizes, allowing manufacturers to build smaller, lighter motors, according to Electron Energy Corp. The firm has teamed up with University of Delaware researchers to develop a manufacturing process that increases sintered rare earth magnets’ electrical resistivity by at least 30 percent. Their goal is to make magnets with increased electrical resistivity that can reduce motor efficiency losses even when motors operate at high speeds.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles could provide clean transportation in the future, but they remain expensive in part because they use the precious metal platinum to facilitate the chemical reactions that produce electricity within the cell. A new method for quickly and cheaply depositing ultrathin layers of platinum might make it practical to reduce the amount of the metal used in fuel-cell catalysts, thereby lowering their cost significantly.


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