Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

What if a sensor sensing a thing could be part of the thing itself? Rice University engineers believe they have a 2D solution to do just that. Rice engineers led by materials scientists Pulickel Ajayan and Jun Lou have developed a method to make atom-flat sensors that seamlessly integrate with devices to report on what they perceive.

Electronically active 2D materials have been the subject of much research since the introduction of graphene in 2004. Even though they are often touted for their strength, they’re difficult to move to where they’re needed without destroying them.

The Ajayan and Lou groups, along with the lab of Rice engineer Jacob Robinson, have a new way to keep the materials and their associate...

“Fluoride batteries can have a higher energy density, which means that they may last longer – up to eight times longer than batteries in use today,” says study co-author Robert Grubbs, Caltech’s Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry and a winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “But fluoride can be challenging to work with, in particular because it’s so corrosive and reactive.”

Fluoride-based batteries have the potential to last up to 8X longer than those in use today. Imagine not having to charge your phone or laptop for weeks...

Graphene unlocks new potential for ‘smart textiles.’
Credit: Prof Craciun Lab

An international team of scientists, led by Professor Monica Craciun from the University of Exeter Engineering department, has pioneered a new technique to create fully electronic fibres that can be incorporated into the production of everyday clothing. Currently, wearable electronics are achieved by essentially gluing devices to fabrics, which can mean they are too rigid and susceptible to malfunctioning.

The new research instead integrates the electronic devices into the fabric of the material, by coating electronic fibres with light-weight, durable components that will allow images to be shown directly on the fabric.

The research team believe that the discovery could revolutionise the creation of wearable elect...

Single crystals of the multiferroic material bismuth-iron-oxide. The bismuth atoms (blue) form a cubic lattice with oxygen atoms (yellow) at each face of the cube and an iron atom (gray) near the center. The somewhat off-center iron interacts with the oxygen to form an electric dipole (P), which is coupled to the magnetic spins of the atoms (M) so that flipping the dipole with an electric field (E) also flips the magnetic moment. The collective magnetic spins of the atoms in the material encode the binary bits 0 and 1, and allow for information storage and logic operations.
Credit: Ramamoorthy Ramesh lab, UC Berkeley

Multiferroics are promising candidates for new type of memory and logic circuits. Researchers from Intel Corp...