Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

Hydrogenation forms a mixture of lithium amide and hydride (light blue) as an outer shell around a lithium nitride particle (dark blue) nanoconfined in carbon. Nanoconfinement suppresses all other intermediate phases to prevent interface formation, which has the effect of dramatically improving the hydrogen storage performance

Lawrence Livermore scientists have collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of researchers including colleagues from Sandia National Laboratories to develop an efficient hydrogen storage system that could be a boon for hydrogen powered vehicles. Hydrogen is an excellent energy carrier, but the development of lightweight solid-state materials for compact, low-pressure storage is a huge challenge.

Complex metal hydrides are a promising class of hydrogen storage mate...

Geoffrey Coates, center, in his lab with James Eagan, a postdoctoral researcher in Coates’ group and researcher Anne LaPointe. Credit: Robert Barker/University Photography

When Geoffrey Coates, Tisch University Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, gives a talk about plastics and recycling, he usually opens with this question: What percentage of the 78 million tons of plastic used annually for packaging – for example, a 2-liter bottle or a take-out food container – actually gets recycled and reused in a similar way? The answer is just 2%. Sadly, nearly a third is leaked into the environment, around 14% is used in incineration and/or energy recovery, and a whopping 40% winds up in landfills.

One of the problems: Polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), 2/3 of the world’s plastic...

The Isomax cell configuration. Credit: UCSB Engineering

Mechanical engineer and materials scientist Jonathan Berger, UCSB Prof. Robert McMeeking and materials scientist Haydn N. G. Wadley from the University of Virginia, prove that the 3D pyramid-and-cross cell geometry Berger conceived is the first of its kind to achieve the performance predicted by theoretical bounds. Its lightness, strength and versatility, according to Berger, lends itself well to a variety of applications, from buildings to vehicles to packaging and transport.

Called Isomax™, the beauty of this solid foam – in this case loosely defined as a combination of a stiff substance and air pockets – lay in the geometry within...

Production process from silicon sawdust to lithium battery anode.

Researchers have created a high performance anode material for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) using waste silicon (Si) sawdust. It is energy-consuming and expensive to produce Si wafers with high purity (> 99.99%). On top of that, some 50% of Si is actually discarded as industrial waste in the final cutting process. This waste is about 90,000 tons a year worldwide, an amount large enough to meet the global demands for anode materials for LIBs.

To make this happen, under the project of “Dynamic Alliance for Open Innovation Bridging Human, Environment and Materials,” a joint research team from Tohoku University and Osaka University has developed a practical and mass-producible method of recycling the unwanted Si sawdust into a h...