Industry News

September 2018
Nanomachine Swarms Could Improve Efficiency of any Machine

Density plot of the power output of an energy-converting network that consists of interacting nano-machines illustrated by the spheres. The power increases from red to blue color, thus in the synchronization phase corresponding to the area enclosed by the white dashed lines, the output of the network is maximized.

All machines convert one form of energy into another form - for example a car engine turns the energy stored in fuel into motion energy. Those processes of energy conversion, described by the theory called thermodynamics, don't only take place on the macro-level of big machines, but also at the micro-level of mol
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Date:
09/27/2018
A Metal That Withstands Ultra-High Temperature and Pressure

3D SEM Microstructure of 1st Generation MoSiBTiC alloy.

Japanese scientists have identified a metal able to stand up to constant forces in ultra high temperature, offering promising applications including in aircraft jet engines and gas turbines for electric power generation. The first-of-its-kind study, published in Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports in Jul
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Date:
09/27/2018
Composite Significantly Reduces Electromagnetic Pollution

A schematic diagram of phase cancellation and microwave attenuation process. The fluffy structure of PANI/Fe ferrite composite can highly increase the transmission path of microwave, and the multiple reflections can enhance the microwave attenuation efficiency of the absorber. Thus, the microwave attenuation capability of PANI/Zn ferrite composites mainly comes from the enhanced effect of fluffy structure, multiple reflections, interfacial polarization, magnetic loss and dielectric loss. Moreover, if the relationship between the coating thickness and the frequency of incident microwaves matched well with the quarter-wave thickness criteria, the incident microwaves would vertically enter the absorber inside, as shown in this figure.

In a paper published in NANO, a group of researchers from Anhui University of Science and Technology have synthesized PANI/Zn ferrite composites which have shown excellent microwave absorption performance. How to reduce electromagnetic pollution? How do these materials attenuate electromagnetic waves? A gro
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Date:
09/27/2018
DOE Announces $218 Million for Quantum Information Science
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $218 million in funding for 85 research awards in the important emerging field of Quantum Information Science (QIS). The awards were made in conjunction with the White House Summit on Advancing American Leadership in QIS, highlighting the high priority that the Administration pl
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Date:
09/26/2018
Photonic Chips Harness Sound Waves to Speed up Local Networks

Dr Amol Choudhary (left) and Professor Ben Eggleton, Director of Sydney Nano, in one of the photonic laboratories at the Sydney Nanoscience Hub.

It used to be known as the information superhighway - the fibre-optic infrastructure on which our gigabytes and petabytes of data whizz around the world at (nearly) the speed of light. And like any highway system, increased traffic has created slowdowns, especially at the junctions where data jumps on or off
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Date:
09/26/2018
What: Conference "Frontier Research and Artificial Intelligence" Where: ERC premises, Place Rogier 16, 1040 Brussels When: 25 and 26 October 2018 The European Research Council (ERC) will host a scientific conference "Frontier Research and Artificial Intelligence" in Bruss
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Date:
09/26/2018
Debating Modern Medical Technologies
Does a new medicine or diagnostic test work? Is it safe? Should the government approve it and insurers pay for it? The answers are not as straightforward as they may seem - and the reasons are the subject of a new book by Karen J. Maschke, a research scholar at The Hastings Center, and Michael K. Gusmano, a Hastings
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Date:
09/26/2018
Breakthrough in Blending Metals

Five metal elements are blended here in a small cluster on a one-nanometer scale.

Researchers in Japan have found a way to create innovative materials by blending metals with precision control. Their approach, based on a concept called atom hybridization, opens up an unexplored area of chemistry that could lead to the development of advanced functional materials. Background Multimetallic clusters -- typically composed of
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Date:
09/24/2018
A Turbo Boost for Materials Science

With support from the National Science Foundation's TRIPODS+X program, Lehigh University's Josh Agar is partnering with the University of California at Berkeley to increase the speed of materials discovery and development, with implications in fields including electronics, healthcare and energy systems.

Every so often, the search for functional materials--materials designed with properties and characteristics that allow it to do something spectacular--delivers a fundamental change to the way we live. 5000 years ago, the discovery and use of bronze enabled no less a task than the ushering in of modern civilization. Mo
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Date:
09/24/2018
Crowd Counting Through Walls With WiFi
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) -- Researchers in UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi's lab have given the first demonstration of crowd counting through walls using only everyday communication signals such as WiFi. The technique, which requires only a wireless transmitter and receiver outside the area of interest, cou
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Date:
09/24/2018
The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will receive $30 million over five years to build and operate an Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT). Researchers will use the testbed to explore superconducting quantum processors and evaluate how these emerging qu
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Date:
09/24/2018
Graphene Bilayer Provides Efficient Transport and Control of Spins

This is Christian Leutenantsmeyer (L) and co-author Josep Ingla-Aynés.

University of Groningen physicists in collaboration with a theoretical physics group from Universität Regensburg have built an optimized bilayer graphene device which displays both long spin lifetimes and electrically controllable spin-lifetime anisotropy. It has the potential for practical applications such as
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Date:
09/21/2018
New Battery Gobbles up Carbon Dioxide
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously co
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Date:
09/21/2018
Using Hydrogen, Methane and Methanol to Reduce CO2 Emissions
Six percent of the world's CO2 emissions are generated by steel production. The use of renewable energy sources in the steel industry is thus very important for responding to climate change. For this reason, researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have now initiated the i3upgrade
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Date:
09/20/2018
$2 Million Award to Reimagine US Power Grid
A $2 million award will equip Michigan State University - and partners Arizona State University, Dresser-Rand and Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures - with resources to develop the next generation of designs for long-duration storage on the United States power grid. The award, created by the U.S. Department of Energy
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Date:
09/20/2018
Commercially Relevant Bismuth-Based Thin Film Processing

The powder sample is insoluble, therefore fabrication of devices using wet processes is not possible.

Osaka - Developing materials suitable for use in optoelectronic devices is currently a very active area of research. The search for materials for use in photoelectric conversion elements has to be carried out in parallel with developing the optimal film formation process for each material, and this can take a
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Date:
09/19/2018
Extremely Small and Fast: Laser Ignites Hot Plasma

With the aid of the powerful X-ray free-electron laser at SLAC in California, HZDR researchers were able to investigate the plasma processes on the small scales of a few nanometers and femtoseconds on which the turbulent laser interaction with the particles to be accelerated takes place.

When light pulses from an extremely powerful laser system are fired onto material samples, the electric field of the light rips the electrons off the atomic nuclei. For fractions of a second, a plasma is created. The electrons couple with the laser light in the process, thereby almost reaching the speed of light. Wh
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Date:
09/18/2018
Munich, Germany, and Milpitas, USA – With a global need to reinforce the security of connected devices that are designed to work without regular human interaction as part of the Internet of Things (IoT), semiconductor-based security pioneer Infineon Technologies AG announced a new development
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Date:
09/17/2018
Dartmouth's Formula Hybrid Wins Coveted Award
The race car design competition Formula Hybrid has been awarded one of the most coveted prizes in engineering education, the ABET Innovation Award. Launched by the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth in 2007, the annual Formula Hybrid competition challenges teams of undergraduate and graduate engineeri
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Date:
09/17/2018
Condensation enhancement: Practical Energy and Water Applications

(A) Dropwise condensation on a hydrophobic plain surface. (B) Filmwise condensation on a hydrophilic plain surface. (C) Sucking flow condensation on a hi-mesh surface consisting of the droplet-to-film coalescence and film-to-droplet sucking flow for efficient surface refreshing and droplet growth. (D) Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of the hi-mesh surface consisting of woven mesh wires bonded onto a copper substrate. (E) SEM image showing the high-density nanostructures covering the mesh wires and substrate. (F) Time-lapse sucking flow condensation figures on the hi-mesh surface. (G) Sustaining enhanced condensation heat transfer on the hi-mesh surfaces.

Condensation heat transfer plays an essential role in the efficiency of various energy-intensive industrial technologies including power generation, energy utilization, water desalination and harvesting, air-conditioning, and thermal management of electronics. It is well known that dropwise condensation on the hy
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Date:
09/17/2018
A Serial Gas Turbine Engine With a 3D-Printed Combustion Chamber

Tested combustion chambers as a component of a serial SGTE is one of the starting stages of the project on creation of a series of new gas turbine drives for energy units with capacity of 400 kW working on biofuel.

Samara University scholars tested one of the key details of aviation gas turbine engine, i.e. combustion chamber "grown" with the help of 3D-printing. It was set and tested on a production model of a small gas turbine engine TA-8 (SGTE) used as an auxiliary power unit of aircraft TU-134. "We were the
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Date:
09/14/2018
Growing Computers in Petri Dishes

In the research, images of handwritten digits will be encoded into what are called 'spike train stimuli,' similar to a two-dimensional bar code. The encoding of the spike train will then be optically applied to a group of networked in vitro neurons with optogenetic labels.

Will the computers of tomorrow be manufactured, or will they be cultivated? This question lies at the heart of new research from Lehigh University that aims to engineer a neural network--a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system--from actual living cells, and program it to compute a basic l
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Date:
09/14/2018
FEFU Young Scientists Developing Laser Equipment Materials
Ceramic heterostructures for optical and microelectronic devices will provide the supremacy in such fields like range findings, optical communications, data laser processing and recording. Work is carrying out under the grant support of the Russian foundation for basic research (RFBR). Young scientists team of F
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Date:
09/13/2018
TOKYO, Japan | San Jose, California, U.S.A.―Renesas Electronics Corporation and Integrated Device Technology, Inc. announced they have signed a definitive agreement under which Renesas will acquire IDT for US$49.00 per share in an all-cash transaction representing an equity value of approximately US$6.7 billion (app
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Date:
09/11/2018
Barriers and Opportunities in Renewable Biofuels Production

Eduard Kerkhoven, Project leader, Computational Metabolic Engineering, Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have identified two main challenges for renewable biofuel production from cheap sources. Firstly, lowering the cost of developing microbial cell factories, and secondly, establishing more efficient methods for hydrolysis of biomass to sugars for fermentation. Th
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Date:
09/11/2018
Drones, Ride Sharers Could Team up for Package Delivery

Naira Hovakimyan, a professor of mechanical science and engineering, directs the Advanced Controls Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In the future, when you hail an Uber or take the bus, you might not only be sharing the ride with another traveler, but perhaps with a drone out on delivery as well. That is the vision of Naira Hovakimyan, professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is
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Date:
09/11/2018
Robot Can Pick Up Any Object After Inspecting It

Manuelli uses the DON system and Kuka robot to grasp a cup.

Humans have long been masters of dexterity, a skill that can largely be credited to the help of our eyes. Robots, meanwhile, are still catching up. Certainly there's been some progress: for decades robots in controlled environments like assembly lines have been able to pick up the same object over and over again. More recently,
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Date:
09/10/2018
How Electromagnetic Waves and Magnetic Materials Interact

Left to right: Yuanxun "Ethan" Wang, Tatsuo Itoh, Zhi Yao, and Rustu Umut Tok.

UCLA Samueli engineers have developed a new tool to model how magnetic materials, which are used in smartphones and other communications devices, interact with incoming radio signals that carry data. It accurately predicts these interactions down to the nanometer scales required to build state-of-the-art communications te
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Date:
09/10/2018
Could AI Robots Develop Prejudice on Their Own?
Showing prejudice towards others does not require a high level of cognitive ability and could easily be exhibited by artificially intelligent machines, new research has suggested. Computer science and psychology experts from Cardiff University and MIT have shown that groups of autonomous machines could dem
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Date:
09/07/2018
Assessing How Interference Impacts on Wireless Networks
The methodology is based on the 3D Ray Launching simulation tool and enables estimates to be made about the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space (or radio propagation) in interior environments (homes, buildings, hospitals, stations, sports areas, shopping areas, industrial environments, etc.) and ma
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Date:
09/07/2018
Pushing 'Print' on Large-Scale Piezoelectric Materials

Atomic force microscopy imaging of 2D GaPO4 and piezoelectric measurements at varying applied voltages

--First ever large-scale 2D surface deposition of piezoelectric material --Simple, inexpensive technique opens new fields for piezo-sensors & energy harvesting Researchers have developed a revolutionary method to 'print' large-scale sheets of two dimensional piezoelectric material, opening new opportunities
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Date:
09/06/2018
Grant Aims Students Toward Next-Gen Bioelectronics

A graphic shows steps to bioelectronics.

A team of cross-discipline collaborators at Rice University has received a $3 million National Science Foundation (NSF) research traineeship grant to start a graduate-level bioelectronics program. Bioelectronics is a developing field that promises to revolutionize interactions between living and electronic systems.
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Date:
09/05/2018
Changing the Type of Silicon Etching Drops Solar Power Costs

Joshua Pearce, professor of material sciences and electrical engineering at Michigan Technological University, has found a way to lower cost of solar power by 10 percent, which could drive investment in the industry.

At the end of one of the hottest summers on record, as fights about how to power homes rage, renewable solar energy continues to present an option that does not significantly add greenhouse gases to the environment in exchange for lighting and cooling our homes. And it's just been given another edge through mat
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Date:
09/05/2018
AVX Honored with 2017 TTI Supplier Excellence Award
FOUNTAIN INN, S.C. – AVX Corporation has earned a TTI Supplier Excellence Award in the EMEA region, which comprises Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, for the fourth consecutive year. Bestowed by TTI, Inc., a leading global electronic components distributor, the award honors AVX for its successful fulfillment of
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Date:
09/05/2018
SiTime and Bosch Accelerate Innovation in MEMS Timing for 5G and IoT
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – SiTime Corporation and Bosch announced a strategic technology partnership to accelerate innovation in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) timing. SiTime will work with Bosch to develop processes for next-generation MEMS resonator products. These MEMS resonators are the heartbeat of
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Date:
09/04/2018
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