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    Category Technology/Electronics

    Waste Silicon Sawdust Recycled into Anode for Lithium-ion battery

    February 22, 2017, Categories  Technology/Electronics, Chemistry/Nanotechnology, Environment/Geology

    Production process from silicon sawdust to lithium battery anode.

    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...

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    Scalable 100% yield production of Conductive Graphene Inks

    February 21, 2017, Categories  Technology/Electronics, Chemistry/Nanotechnology

    We report the exfoliation of graphite in aqueous solutions under high shear rate [∼ 108 s–1] turbulent flow conditions, with a 100% exfoliation yield. The material is stabilized without centrifugation at concentrations up to 100 g/L using carboxymethylcellulose sodium salt to formulate conductive printable inks. The sheet resistance of blade coated films is below ∼2Ω/□. This is a simple and scalable production route for conductive inks for large-area printing in flexible electronics.

    We report the exfoliation of graphite in aqueous solutions under high shear rate [∼ 108 s–1] turbulent flow conditions, with a 100% exfoliation yield. The material is stabilized without centrifugation at concentrations up to 100 g/L using carboxymethylcellulose sodium salt to formulate conductive printable inks. The sheet resistance of blade coated films is below ∼2Ω/□. This is a simple and scalable production route for conductive inks for large-area printing in flexible electronics.

    Conductive inks are useful for a range of applications, including printed and flexible electronics such as radio frequency identification (RFID) antennas, transistors or photovoltaic cells...

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    Switched-on DNA: Sparking Nano-Electronic Applications

    February 21, 2017, Categories  Biology/Biotechnology, Physics, Technology/Electronics

    EC gate control of DNA conductance. (a) Illustration of the experiment, where the source and drain electrodes are the STM tip and substrate, and EC gate is a silver electrode inserted in the solution. A DNA molecule bridged between the source and drain electrodes via the thiolate linker groups, where charge hops from one base to the next (red arrows) via overlapping π-orbitals. The source-drain bias (Vds), and the EC gate voltage (Vg) are controlled independently. (b) From left to right: redox modified DNA (Aq-DNA), where a base was replaced with an anthraquinone (Aq) moiety (highlighted in blue) at the 3′-end of a DNA strand (see chemical structure in Supplementary Fig. 1a); three-dimensional structure (PDB ID: 2KK5, results are from nuclear magnetic resonance study17) shows that the Aq moiety intercalated in between the two Guanine bases on the other strand acts as a hopping site (red arrows) with its π-orbital overlapping with those from adjacent bases. Aq moiety is shown in blue. Picture is created from 2KK5 in PDB with JSmol software. DNA without the Aq moiety (u-DNA) was studied as control. Both Aq-DNA and u-DNA contain a strand terminated with thiolated linkers at the 3′- and 5′-ends for contact with the source and drain electrodes.

    EC gate control of DNA conductance.

    DNA may very well also pack quite the jolt for engineers trying to advance the development of tiny, low-cost electronic devices. Much like flipping your light switch at home – only on a scale 1,000 times smaller than a human hair – an ASU-led team has developed the first controllable DNA switch to regulate the flow of electricity within a single, atomic-sized molecule.

    “It has been established that charge transport is possible in DNA, but for a useful device, one wants to be able to turn the charge transport on and off. We achieved this goal by chemically modifying DNA,” said Tao, who directs the Biodesign Center for Bioelectronics and Biosensors and is a professor in the Fulton Schools of Engineering...

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    Designing New Materials from ‘Small’ Data

    February 20, 2017, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics, Chemistry/Nanotechnology

    Predictive materials discovery framework.

    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...

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