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Category: engineering – Page 94

Circa 2020 This shape changing metal discovery can lead us closer to foglet machines.

Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Received 25th August 2020, Accepted 16th November 2020.

Metal halide perovskites (MHPs) are frontrunners among solution-processable materials for lightweight, large-area and flexible optoelectronics. These materials, with the general chemical formula AMX3, are structurally complex, undergoing multiple polymorph transitions as a function of temperature and pressure. In this review, we provide a detailed overview of polymorphism in three-dimensional MHPs as a function of composition, with A = Cs+, MA+, or FA+, M = Pb2+ or Sn2+, and X = Cl−, Br−, or I−. In general, perovskites adopt a highly symmetric cubic structure at elevated temperatures. With decreasing temperatures, the corner-sharing MX6 octahedra tilt with respect to one another, resulting in multiple polymorph transitions to lower-symmetry tetragonal and orthorhombic structures. The temperatures at which these phase transitions occur can be tuned via different strategies, including crystal size reduction, confinement in scaffolds and (de-)pressurization.

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The success of COVID-19 vaccines is a great example of gene medicine’s tremendous potential to prevent viral infections. One reason for the vaccines’ success is their use of lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, to carry delicate messenger RNA to cells to generate and boost immunity. LNPs—tiny fat particles—have become increasingly popular as a carrier to deliver various gene-based medicines to cells, but their use is complicated because each LNP must be tailored specifically for the therapeutic payload it carries.

A team led by Hai-Quan Mao, a Johns Hopkins materials scientist, has created a platform that shows promise to speed up the LNP design process and make it more affordable. The new approach also can be adapted to other gene therapies.

“In a nutshell, what we have done is creating a method that screens lipid nanoparticle components and their proportions to quickly help identify and create the optimal design for use with various therapeutic ,” said Mao, director of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and professor in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.

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Trains that run on hydrogen.

Re-sharing.

(CNN) — The future of environmentally friendly travel might just be here — and it’s Germany that’s leading the charge, with the first ever rail line to be entirely run on hydrogen-powered trains, starting from Wednesday.

Fourteen hydrogen trains powered by fuel cell propulsion will exclusively run on the route in Bremervörde, Lower Saxony. The 93 million euro ($92.3 million) deal has been struck by state subsidiary Landesnahverkehrsgesellschaft Niedersachsen (LVNG), the owners of the railway, and Alstom, builders of the Coradia iLint trains. The Elbe-Weser Railways and Transport Company (EVB), which will operate the trains, and gas and engineering company Linde, are also part of the project.

The trains, five of which which debut Wednesday, will gradually replace the 15 diesel trains that currently run on the route, with all 14 running exclusively by the end of the year. Just 1 kilo of hydrogen fuel can do the same as around 4.5 kilos of diesel.

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The technology is based on integrated circuits, which typically rely on silicon semiconductors in order to process information in a way that is similar to the role played by the brain in the human body.

The research team discovered that integrated circuits capable of performing computational tasks could be achieved using “nearly any material” around us.

“We have created the first example of an engineering material that can simultaneously sense, think and act upon mechanical stress, without requiring additional circuits to process such signals,” said Ryan Harne, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State.

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Chaos, as a very interesting nonlinear phenomenon, has been intensively studied in the last three decades [10], [13]. It is found to be useful or has great potential in many disciplines such as in collapse prevention of power systems, biomedical engineering applications to the human brain and heart, thorough liquid mixing with low power consumption, secret communication technology, to name just a few [10], [13], [24].

Over the last decade, many new types of synchronization have appeared: chaotic synchronization [3], [4], lag synchronization [9], adaptive synchronization [2], phase synchronization [6], and generalized synchronization [9], to mention only a few. Since the discovery of chaos synchronization [3], there has been tremendous interest in studying the synchronization of chaotic systems [10]. Recently, synchronization of coupled chaotic systems has received considerable attention [1], [2], [5], [7]. Especially, a typical study of synchronization is the coupled identical chaotic systems [1], [6].

In 1963, Lorenz found the first classical chaotic attractor [12]. In 1999, Chen found another similar but topologically not equivalent chaotic attractor [11], [21], [22], as the dual of the Lorenz system, in a sense defined by Vanĕc̆ek and C̆elikovský [23]: The Lorenz system satisfies the condition a12 a21 0 while Chen system satisfies a12 a21 0. Very recently, Lü et al. produced a new chaotic system [14], [15], which satisfies the condition a12 a21 =0, thereby bridging the gap between the Lorenz and Chen attractors [15], [16], [17].

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This new invention is highly scalable since its raw materials are commercially available and easy to access.

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) College of Design and Engineering (CDE) has developed a self-charging electricity generation (MEG) device that generates electricity from air moisture, according to a press release by the institution.

Imagine being able to generate electricity by harnessing moisture in the air around you with just everyday items like sea salt and a piece of fabric, or even powering everyday electronics with a non-toxic battery that is as thin as paper. A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) College of Design and Engineering (CDE) has developed a new moisture-driven electricity generation (MEG) device made of a thin layer of fabric — about 0.3 millimetres (mm) in thickness — sea salt, carbon ink, and a special water-absorbing gel.

The concept of MEG devices is built upon the ability of different materials to generate electricity from the interaction with moisture in the air. This area has been receiving growing interest due to its potential for a wide range of real-world applications, including self-powered devices such as wearable electronics like health monitors, electronic skin sensors, and information storage devices.

Key challenges of current MEG technologies include water saturation of the device when exposed to ambient humidity and unsatisfactory electrical performance. Thus, the electricity generated by conventional MEG devices is insufficient to power electrical devices and is also not sustainable.

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Imagine being able to generate electricity by harnessing moisture in the air around you with just everyday items like sea salt and a piece of fabric, or even powering everyday electronics with a non-toxic battery that is as thin as paper. A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) College of Design and Engineering (CDE) has developed a new moisture-driven electricity generation (MEG) device made of a thin layer of fabric—about 0.3 millimeters (mm) in thickness—sea salt, carbon ink, and a special water-absorbing gel.

The concept of MEG devices is built upon the ability of different materials to generate electricity from the interaction with moisture in the air. This area has been receiving growing interest due to its potential for a wide range of real-world applications, including self-powered devices such as wearable electronics like health monitors, electronic skin sensors, and information storage devices.

Key challenges of current MEG technologies include water saturation of the device when exposed to ambient humidity and unsatisfactory electrical performance. Thus, the electricity generated by conventional MEG devices is insufficient to power and is also not sustainable.

Read more | >

Iron could massively boost ocean algae populations.

Scientists suggest we could fertilize the world’s oceans with iron to fight climate change. Iron would lead to phytoplankton blooms, which would help to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

One “very conservative” estimate suggests a gigaton of carbon dioxide could be removed per year with this method.

Scientists have hatched a plan to flood the world’s oceans with phytoplankton in a bid to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Scientists are seriously considering blocking out the Sun. To be more precise, they want to reflect a fraction of the sunlight that reaches Earth back out into the Solar System via a method called solar geoengineering.

Continue reading “Scientists Want to Block Out the Sun. Should We? Is it Even Possible?” | >

The new concrete made of tyres will be eco-friendly and cheaper. Engineers from RMIT succeeded in producing concrete from materials such as gravel, tyre, rubber, and crushed rock. It is believed that this innovation will be cheaper and eco-friendly. The team is now looking into reinforcing the concrete to see how it can work in structural elements. A group of researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), has succeeded in replacing the classic method of making concrete, which is made of gravel and crushed rock, with rubber from discarded tyres that are suitable for building codes.

According to the press release that has been published by the university, new greener and lighter concrete also promises to reduce manufacturing and transportation costs significantly. Small amounts of rubber particles from tyres are already used to replace these concrete aggregates. However, the previous process of replacing all concrete with aggregates had not been successful.

The study published in the Resources, Conservation & Recycling journal showed the tyres’ manufacturing process.

Lead author and Ph.D. researcher from RMIT University’s School of Engineering, Mohammad Momeen Ul Islam, stated that this work was revolutionary because it showed what could be done with recycled rubber pieces.

Full Story:

Australia’s RMIT engineering team made greener and lighter concrete.

Continue reading “Australian engineers produce concrete from tyre, rubber, and rocks” | >