Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

University of Basel researchers have reached an important milestone in their quest to produce more sustainable luminescent materials and catalysts for converting sunlight into other forms of energy. They have developed a new class of compounds, based on the cheap metal manganese, with promising properties that until now have primarily been found in noble metal compounds.

Smartphone screens and catalysts for artificial photosynthesis — to produce fuels from sunlight, for example — often contain very rare metals...

Purified tin selenide has extraordinarily high thermoelectric performance. Perseverance, NASA’s 2020 Mars rover, is powered by something very desirable here on Earth: a thermoelectric device, which converts heat to useful electricity.

On Mars, the heat source is the radioactive decay of plutonium, and the device’s conversion efficiency is 4-5%. That’s good enough to power Perseverance and its operations but not quite good enough for applications on Earth.

A team of scientists from Northwestern University and Seoul National University in Korea now has demonstrated a high-performing thermoelectric material in a practical form that can be used ...

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have designed a novel material to make all-solid-state lithium (Li) batteries less costly but more effective, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communicationson July 20.

Solid electrolytes are important to realizing safe, energy-dense all-solid-state Li batteries. Among different types of solid electrolytes, the chloride solid electrolytes were recently found to exhibit the desirable characteristics of both sulfide and oxide systems, including high ionic conductivity, deformability and oxidative stability. The rare combination of these advantages has rapidly attracted wide interest...

In the late 1970s, M. Stanley Whittingham was the first to describe the concept of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, an achievement for which he would share the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet even he couldn’t have anticipated the complex materials science challenges that would arise as these batteries came to power the world’s portable electronics.

One persistent technical problem is that every time a new lithium-ion battery is installed in a device, up to about one-fifth of its energy capacity is lost before the device can...