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From the Materials World archive: in the February 2013 issue, we looked at the amazing properties of silica aerogels. Read the whole story here

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Eesha Khare is an American student and an inventor of a supercapacitor to replace conventional batteries in portable electronics, that charges faster and lasts for more charging cycles. Khare, an 18-year-old graduate of Lynbrook High School in California, demonstrated a electrochemical supercapacitor prototype that can be fully charged within 20 seconds. Her technology is expected to be scalable to power cell phones and even cars, with similar performance. Moreover, it holds the charge longer than other devices. Khare’s invention won her $50,000 in prize money at the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award held in Phoenix, Arizona.[2][3] She held her specialization in Nanochemistry responsible behind the invention. Afterwards, she got the attention of Google and other technological giants.[4]

Under the supervision of Dr. Yat Li at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Cruz [1], she designed, synthesized, and characterized a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogenated TiO2 (H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell, fabricated into a flexible solid-state device. Tests showed 238.5 Farads per gram, 20.1 Watt-hours per kilogram, 20540 Watts per kilogram, and only 32.5% capacitance loss over 10,000 charging cycles.[5]

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UT Austin’s John Goodenough wins engineering’s highest honor for pioneering lithium-ion battery The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) will bestow John B. Goodenough of The University of Texas at Austin with the highest honor in the engineering profession for the groundbreaking creation of the lithium-ion battery. He is one of four recipients of this year’s Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering in recognition of their significant roles in developing the lithium-ion battery, which is used by millions of people around the world in devices such as cellphones, laptops, tablets, hearing aids, cameras, power tools and many other mobile electronics. Read more.

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#Worth Having

Do you want to work all the time? Presuming the answer is yes, here are some apps to keep you off street corners and out of trouble.

CAD View 3D – a 3D data file viewer designed for computer aided design users. You can rotate each model and change the materials and colours used. Now available on...

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#supercapcitors #energy #materials #nanotechnology

Supercapacitor Stores Electricity on Silicon Chips Solar cells that produce electricity day and night, not just when the sun is shining. Mobile phones with built-in power cells that recharge in seconds and work for weeks between charges. These are just two of the possibilities raised by a novel supercapacitor design invented by material scientists at Vanderbilt Univ. that is described in a paper published in Scientific Reports. It is the first supercapacitor that is made out of silicon so it can be built into a silicon chip along with the microelectronic circuitry that it powers. In fact, it should be possible to construct these power cells out of the excess silicon that exists in the current generation of solar cells, sensors, mobile phones and a variety of other electromechanical devices, providing a considerable cost savings. Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/10/supercapacitor-stores-electricity-silicon-chips

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#science #materialsengineer #lithium ion batteries #supercapcitors #graphene

2 Scientists Accidentally Discover A World-Changing Super Material

Since a pair of Russian scientists won the Nobel Prize for discoveringgraphene in 2002, scientists have raced to find a more efficient way to make it. Among them were Ric Kaner and Maher El-Kady, two UCLA scientists who were searching for a better way to manufacture the super-strong material when they accidentally happened upon another holy grail in the science community: an efficient, biodegradable battery-like device—technically speaking, a supercapacitor.

They had accidentally created a graphene supercapacitor, which charges more quickly (and with more power) than regular batteries, making it a potential candidate to power a future generation of super-efficient gadgets, cars, and systems.

Kaner describes the device as “like a battery, but charges and discharges 100 to 1,000 times faster.” He imagines charging an iPhone in 30 seconds, or fully charging an electric car in minutes.

Equally important are the supercapacitor’s environmental benefits: Unlike batteries, which contain toxic chemicals and metals, graphene is entirely biodegradable.

Here’s the full story.

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Graphene Ultracapacitors Offer Blistering Performance and Charge in a Couple of Minutes

Researchers at the University of California are developing graphene supercapacitors that can charge and discharge in a couple of minutes. The ability to discharge in a couple of minutes means that they are extremely powerful. More importantly though, these researchers developed a technique for printing graphene supercapacitors using a DVD burner.

The researchers dissolved graphite oxide in water and heated it with a laser from a standard DVD burner to obtain flexible graphene sheets. These graphene sheets are one-atom thick, yet can hold a remarkable amount of energy, while being charged or discharged in very little time compared to standard batteries.

Ultracapacitors have tremendous advantages over typical lithium-ion batteries, some of which are of paramount importance to the adoption of electric cars, such as their ability to charge in as little as 1 second, and last 20 years (easily, and with very heavy usage).

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MIT and Harvard Engineers Use “DNA-Legos” To Construct Graphene Nanostructures

This news is a follow-up to an earlier post “Harvard Researchers Create Self-Assembling Nano Bricks Made of DNA.”

Engineers are now using  self-assembling DNA nanobricks as a scaffold to build nanostructures out of graphene.

The MIT and Harvard researchers are essentially taking these shapes and binding them to a graphene surface with a molecule called aminopyrine.

Once bound, the DNA is coated with a layer of silver, and then a layer of gold to stabilize it. The gold-covered DNA is then used as a mask for plasma lithography, where oxygen plasma burns away the graphene that isn’t covered. Finally, the DNA mask is washed away with sodium cyanide, leaving a piece of graphene that is an almost-perfect copy of the DNA template.

So far, the researchers have used this process — dubbed metallized DNA nanolithography — to create X and Y junctions, rings, and ribbons out of graphene.

Nanoribbons, which are simply very narrow strips of graphene, are of particular interest because they have a bandgap — a feature that graphene doesn’t normally possess. A bandgap means that these nanoribbons have semiconductive properties, which means they might one day be used in computer chips.

Graphene rings are also of interest, because they can be fashioned into quantum interference transistors — a new and not-well-understood transistor that connects three terminals to a ring, with the transistor’s gate being controlled by the flow of electrons around the ring.

(via MIT and Harvard engineers create graphene electronics with DNA-based lithography | ExtremeTech)

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The Super Supercapacitor

This (very well directed, if not a tad cliche) video has gone viral over the past few days. It shows how researchers at UCLA have discovered  a unique and cheap way of producing graphene sheets and, as a biproduct,  a revolutionary use for graphene as a (super-super-super) capacitator.

The researchers painted a DVD with liquid carbon solution and proceeded to run it through a consumer grade DVD-burner. The result? A one-atom thick sheet of graphene storing a surprisingly high amount of charge. What followed was arguably the more interesting discovery: the researchers managed to run a light-bulb for about 5 minutes with this sheet of graphene. Consider that; a graphene sheet that had been charged for less than 5 seconds had the capacitance to power a light bulb for 5 minutes. Simply astounding. 

As is the case with any ‘recent’ discovery, there is always the possibility that further research will show that there is some sort of fatal flaw in the research.The work itself, however, was reported over a year back, and the researchers brought out a new paper this Tuesday detailing a method which could be used to replicate their work in mass-production.

So, there is hope yet for that perfect mobile phone which can be recharged in a matter of seconds!

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#ferrofluids #MaterialsEngineering #Physics

Ferrofluid - The Magnetic Liquid!

Materials scientist and Christmas Lecturer Mark Miodownik demonstrates some of the weird properties of ferrofluid. This liquid is literally ‘dripping with magnetism’, containing a suspension of ferromagnetic nanoparticles that make the liquid responsive to external magnetic fields, generating unusual patterns, shapes and motion.

Using a strong neodymium magnet and a large steel bolt, Mark demonstrates the strange and beautiful patterns the fluid forms in response to the magnetic field. Ferrofluids do not tend to maintain their behaviour in the absence of an external magnetic field and are therefore known as superparamagnets.

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Bilayer graphene grown by depositing carbon atoms from methane gas.

Source (UCSB College of Engineering)

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Here’s the second part of our 2013 hit parade of covers.

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Andri Pol takes a look inside CERN’s Swiss headquarters

Since being established in 1952, CERN (european organization for nuclear research) has been an internationally recognized center charged with the considerable task of exploring and understanding the fundamental structure of our universe. located near Geneva, close to the Franco-Swiss border, a team of over 2,500 physicists, engineers and researchers utilize some of the most complex and vast instruments on earth, studying the particles of matter which make up the world around us. the 2,512 members of on-site staff include 1,021 engineers and scientists, 883 technicians, 397 administrators and office staff, 132 craftspeople and 79 research physicists.

(Continue Reading)

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Phase-Change Mug Promises To Keep Coffee At The Perfect Temperature

by Rachel Nuwer

For those of us tied to a desk for hours each day, the bitter charms of lukewarm coffee are an unpleasant reality of the job. But a new startup called Joeveo says, “No more!” The hot-beverage-loving founders developed a mug that uses phase-change materials to keep drinks—coffee, tea, hot chocolate or even mulled wine—at a scrumptious 140-145 degrees Fahrenheit for up to three hours after it’s been poured.

“Your coffee only has a drinkable window of 10 to 20 minutes—maybe 30 at most,” says Logan Maxwell, vice president of Joeveo. “That’s really not much time to enjoy your beverage right where you want it: not too hot but not too lukewarm.”

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