Category Technology/Electronics

This diagram shows the new model at work: By taking into account a number of factors, including water-use patterns and water chemistry, engineers can predict where lead particles will dislodge and end up in the drinking water supply during a partial lead service line (LSL) replacement. Courtesy: Biswas Lab

While lead pipes were banned decades ago, they still supply millions of American households daily with drinking water amid risks of corrosion and leaching that can cause developmental and neurological effects in young children. One common abatement: Dig up old lead lines and replace a portion of them with another metal, such as copper. However, this technique can dislodge lead particulates and release them into the water supply...

Researchers at the University’s Institute of Optics developed a technique that uses lasers to render materials hydrophobic—extremely water repellant. (University photo / Matthew Mann)

Tiny micro- and nanoscale structures within a material’s surface are invisible to the naked eye, but play a big role in determining a material’s physical, chemical, and biomedical properties. Over the past few years, Chunlei Guo and his University of Rochester team found ways to manipulate those structures by irradiating laser pulses to a material’s surface. They altered materials to make them repel water, attract water, and absorb great amounts of light – all without any type of coating. Now, Guo, Anatoliy Vorobyev, and Ranran Fang at University’s Institute of Optics, have advanced the research...

This recovered bismuth sample has a rhombohedral structure and contains liquid structural motifs after deep melting at high pressures. The surprising structural memory effect in the molten state is responsible for the unexpected change from magnetic repulsion to magnetic attraction in bismuth. Credit: Image courtesy of Yu Shu and Guoyin Shen

New work used high pressure and temperature to reveal a kind of “structural memory” in samples of bismuth, a discovery with great electrical engineering potential. Bismuth is a historically interesting element for scientists, as a number of important discoveries in the metal physics world were made while studying it, including important observations about the effect of magnetic fields on electrical conductivity. Bismuth has a number of phases...

This is an illustration of ordered nanoparticle organization induced by the novel method (SCPINS). It is applicable to different pattern geometries and particle compositions. The background electric-circuit model pattern is shown as an example.
Credit: The University of Akron

Entropy instead of Chemistry can be used to control organization of nanoparticles into patterns in ultrathin polymer films according to a discovery by Dr. Alamgir Karim, UA’s Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company Professor of Polymer Engineering, and his student Dr. Ren Zhang. Polymer thin films are used in a variety of technological applications, for example paints, lubricants, and adhesives...