nanopores tagged posts

A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. The research appeared in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This is very exciting,” says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering and the paper’s lead author. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant...

A research team has made a groundbreaking discovery in the quest to replace hydrofluorocarbons in refrigeration systems with natural refrigerants such as water and alcohol. Their study involved carrying-out a liquid-to-gas phase transition via a nanosponge, a soft, elastic material equipped with small nanopores less than 10 nanometers. Their findings could lead to more efficient refrigerants with a smaller carbon footprint.

Refrigeration systems are widely used in air conditioners and refrigerators. Conventional systems use hydrofluorocarbons as a refrigerant. However, hydrofluorocarbons are super pollutants. Their Global Warming Potential is about 1300 times higher than that of CO2.

The team of researcher...

This visualisation shows layers of graphene used for membranes. Credit: University of Manchester

In a battery system, electrodes containing porous graphene scaffolding offer a substantial improvement in both the retention and transport of energy, a new study reveals. Usually, techniques to improve the density of stored charge conflict with those that aim to improve the speed at which ions can move through a material. Nanostructured materials have shown extraordinary promise for electrochemical energy storage, but these materials are usually limited to laboratory cells with ultrathin electrodes and very low mass loadings.

Hongtao Sun et al. overcome this obstacle by incorporating holey graphene into a niobium pentoxide electrode. The nanopores facilitate rapid ion transport...