Category Physics

Predictive materials discovery framework.

A novel workflow combining machine learning and density functional theory calculations has been developed by Northwestern Engineering and Los Alamos National Laboratory to create design guidelines for new materials that exhibit useful electronic properties, such as ferroelectricity and piezoelectricity. Few layered materials have these qualities in certain geometries – crucial for developing solutions to electronics, communication, and energy problems – ie there was very little data from which to formulate the guidelines using traditional research approaches.

“When others look for new materials, typically they look in places where they have a lot of data from similar materials...

The bipod gait is faster than the tripod gait during ground locomotion in a hexapod robot.

When vertebrates run, their legs exhibit minimal cont

act with the ground. But insects are different. These 6-legged creatures run fastest using a 3-legged, or “tripod” gait where they have 3 legs on the ground at all times – 2 on 1 side of their body and one on the other. The tripod gait has long inspired engineers who design six-legged robots, but is it necessarily the fastest and most efficient way for bio-inspired robots to move on the ground?

Researchers at EPFL and UNIL revealed there is in fact a faster way for robots to locomote on flat ground, provided they don’t have the adhesive pads used by insects to climb walls and ceilings...

Researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technologies Laboratories (MTL) have designed a new power converter that maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 100 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a millionfold increase in current levels.

Design reduces converter’s resting power consumption by 50%. The “internet of things”, IoT is the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock will soon have sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Those sensors will have to operate at very low powers, in order to extend battery life for months or make do with energy harvested from the environment...

Lithium-sulfur battery with Mixed Conduction Membrane barrier to stop polysulfide shuttling. Credit: Sri Narayan and Derek Moy

USC researchers may have just found a solution for one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the next wave of rechargeable batteries—small enough for cellphones and powerful enough for cars. In a paper published in the January issue of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Sri Narayan and Derek Moy of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute outline how they developed an alteration to the lithium-sulfur battery that could make it more than competitive with the industry standard lithium-ion battery.

The lithium-sulfur battery, long thought to be better at energy storage capacity than its more popular lithium-ion counterpart, was hampered by its short cycle ...