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Category: sustainability – Page 93

Hexagonal boron nitride coatings on metal alloys enhance durability, reduce friction, and protect against harsh conditions, paving the way for improvements in solar panels, semiconductors, and aerospace components.

Researchers demonstrated that stainless steel and other metal alloys coated with hexagonal boron nitride, or hBN, exhibit non-stick or low-friction qualities along with improved long-term protection against harsh corrosion and high-temperature oxidation in air.

Metal alloys — mixtures of two or more metals — are created to be strong, durable, and resistant to corrosion or oxidation. By adding coatings, or “armor,” to make those materials even tougher, scientists could enhance existing products and enable the creation of new, innovative ones.

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Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed a new, more environmentally friendly way to create conductive inks for use in organic electronics such as solar cells, artificial neurons, and soft sensors. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, pave the way for future sustainable technology.

Organic electronics are on the rise as a complement and, in some cases, a replacement to traditional silicon-based electronics. Thanks to simple manufacturing, high flexibility, and low weight combined with the electrical properties typically associated with traditional semiconductors, it can be useful for applications such as digital displays, energy storage, solar cells, sensors, and soft implants.

Challenges in Organic Electronics.

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A research team led by Lynden Archer, professor and dean of Cornell Engineering, has developed a new lithium battery that can charge in as little as five minutes. This could help address anxiety associated with the charging time of electric vehicles (EVs) and increase their adoption.

In their bid to reduce emissions from transportation, countries worldwide are looking to electrify various modes of transport. Road-based transport such as cars, buses, and trucks have led this transformation, aiming to even ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered cars in the next decade.

With technological advances, the fastest commercial charger can charge up an EV in no less than 30 minutes. While this might be a major improvement over the 8-hour charge cycles of a typical home-based charger, it still needs to be improved for large-scale adoption of EVs.

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Researchers with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have grown a twisted multilayer crystal structure for the first time and measured the structure’s key properties. The twisted structure could help researchers develop next-generation materials for solar cells, quantum computers, lasers and other devices.

“This structure is something that we have not seen before—it was a huge surprise to me,” said Yi Cui, a professor at Stanford and SLAC and co-author of a paper published in Science describing the work. “A new quantum electronic property could appear within this three-layer twisted structure in future experiments.”

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A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a new fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt.

About the size of a standard paperback book, the completely soil-powered technology could fuel underground sensors used in precision agriculture and green infrastructure. This potentially could offer a sustainable, renewable alternative to batteries, which hold toxic, flammable chemicals that leach into the ground, are fraught with conflict-filled supply chains and contribute to the ever-growing problem of electronic waste.

To test the new fuel cell, the researchers used it to power sensors measuring soil moisture and detecting touch, a capability that could be valuable for tracking passing animals. To enable wireless communications, the researchers also equipped the soil-powered sensor with a tiny antenna to transmit data to a neighboring base station by reflecting existing radio frequency signals.

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How can clean drinking water be produced in the simplest most cost-effective way possible? This is what a recent study published in Nature Sustainability hopes to find out as an international team of researchers led by The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) have developed a novel method for producing clean drinking water using only a syringe and a hydrogel filter. This study holds the potential to develop cheaper and simpler methods for producing clean drinking water for individuals around the world.

“The pressing concern of particle-polluted water, particularly in remote and underdeveloped regions where people frequently rely on contaminated water sources for consumption, demands immediate attention and recognition,” said Dr. Guihua Yu, who is a professor of materials science in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin and a co-author on the study. “Our system, with its high efficiency in removing diverse types of particles, offers an attractive yet practical solution in improving freshwater availability.”

For the study, the researchers developed their water purification system that incorporates a biodegradable hydrogel filter capable of removing particles as small as approximately 10 nanometers (0.0000003937 inches) from water that is injected into the hydrogel using a syringe. Once injected, the water passes through the hydrogel and into any drinking or storage water apparatus. Along with filtering out particles at 10 nanometers, the researchers also noted the filter efficiency rate is 100 percent, both of which surpass commercially available filters. For context, the researchers note that commercial filter efficiency rates for particles larger than 10 nanometers are approximately 40 percent and 80 percent, respectively. Additionally, the device can be scaled at various sizes and is reusable, resulting in both reduced cost and environmental impact.

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“Our current schedule shows that we will start production towards the end of 2025,” he said during an earnings call. “But there’s…a tremendous amount of new revolutionary manufacturing technology here.”

That tech will initially be put to the test at Tesla’s Giga Texas plant in Austin. “We’ll follow that up with other locations around the world. Probably the factory we’ll build in Mexico will be second, and then we’ll be looking to identify a third location, perhaps by the end of this year or early next outside of North America,” Musk said.

“That will be a challenging production ramp,” he added. “We’ll be sleeping on the line practically. In fact, not practically. We will be.”

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