Topic close-up #2Symposium: C04—Pits and Pores 10: Nanomaterials – Fabrication, Properties, and Applications
PRiME 2024, a joint international meeting of The Electrochemical Society (ECS), The Electrochemical Society of Japan (ECSJ), and The Korean Electrochemical Society (KECS), takes place in Honolulu, HI, from October 6-11, 2024.
For additional information on PRiME 2024 symposia, see topic close-ups.
Chuanfang (John) Zhang, Valeria Nicolosi, and Sang-Hoon Park. Credit: Naoise Culhane
Have you ever wished you could increase your cellphone battery life? Well, that technology may very well already be here.
Researchers from AMBER, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering, at Trinity College Dublin, have announced the development of a new material which offers the potential to improve battery life in everyday electronics, like smartphones, according to Irish Tech News.
The discovery could mean that the average phone battery life, roughly 10 hours of talk time, could increase to 30-40 hours.
MXenes, an ink-based nanomaterial, not only significantly improves battery life, but it also offers its batteries the flexibility to become smaller in size, without losing performance. (more…)
A nanoparticle that can help clean water of cadmium becomes toxic once taking in the metal. But research finds that organic matter, in this case from algae, reduces that toxicity.
Nanotechnology plays an important role in removing toxic chemicals found in the soil. Currently more than 70 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund sites are using or testing nanoparticles to remove or degrade environmental contaminants. One of these—nano-zero-valent iron—is widely used, though its effect on organisms has not been examined.
In a recent experiment, a team of scientists tested the effect of sulfurized nano-zero-valent iron (FeSSi) on a common freshwater alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii). They found that FeSSi picked up cadmium from a watery medium and alleviated cadmium toxicity to that alga for more than a month.
Scientists have turned wood into an electrical conductor by making its surface graphene.
Chemist James Tour of Rice University and his colleagues used a laser to blacken a thin film pattern onto a block of pine. The pattern is laser-induced graphene (LIG), a form of the atom-thin carbon material discovered at Rice in 2014.
“It’s a union of the archaic with the newest nanomaterial into a single composite structure,” Tour says.
Previous iterations of LIG were made by heating the surface of a sheet of polyimide, an inexpensive plastic, with a laser. Rather than a flat sheet of hexagonal carbon atoms, LIG is a foam of graphene sheets with one edge attached to the underlying surface and chemically active edges exposed to the air.
Not just any polyimide would produce LIG, and some woods work better than others, Tour says. The research team tried birch and oak, but found that pine’s cross-linked lignocellulose structure made it better for the production of high-quality graphene than woods with a lower lignin content. Lignin is the complex organic polymer that forms rigid cell walls in wood.
By: Sameer Sonkusale, Tufts University
Image: Alonso Nichols, Tufts University, CC BY-ND
Doctors have various ways to assess your health. For example, they measure your heart rate and blood pressure to indirectly assess your heart function, or straightforwardly test a blood sample for iron content to diagnose anemia. But there are plenty of situations in which that sort of monitoring just isn’t possible.
To test the health of muscle and bone in contact with a hip replacement, for example, requires a complicated – and expensive – procedure. And if problems are found, it’s often too late to truly fix them. The same is true when dealing with deep wounds or internal incisions from surgery.
In my engineering lab at Tufts University, we asked ourselves whether we could make sensors that could be seamlessly embedded in body tissue or organs – and yet could communicate to monitors outside the body in real time. The first concern, of course, would be to make sure that the materials wouldn’t cause infection or an immune response from the body. The sensors would also need to match the mechanical properties of the body part they would be embedded in: soft for organs and stretchable for muscle. And, ideally, they would be relatively inexpensive to make in large quantities.
MXene is a nanomaterial that can super effectively block and absorb electromagnetic radiation.
Image: Drexel University
We’ve all experienced electromagnetic interference, whether it’s hearing your car engine break in your AM radio station or the squealing of speakers at a concert when a cellphone gets to close. However, researchers from Drexel University may have found a way to all but stop this interference though what they’re calling MXene (2D Transition Metal Carbides).
Electromagnetic interference isn’t just annoying for users, it’s damaging for devices and could lead to the overall degradation of cellphones, laptops, and other electronics.
Typically, to block this interference, scientists encase the interior of electronics with conductive metal (i.e. metal, copper, or aluminum). But researchers for this new study found that a few-atoms thin titanium carbide may be more effective at blocking such interference. Additionally, it is extremely easy to apply – with the ability to be sprayed on to any surface just like paint.
“With technology advancing so fast, we expect smart devices to have more capabilities and become smaller every day. This means packing more electronic parts in one device and more devices surrounding us,” says ECS Fellow Yury Gogotsi, lead author of the research. “To have all these electronic components working without interfering with each other, we need shields that are thin, light and easy to apply to devices of different shapes and sizes. We believe MXenes are going to be the next generation of shielding materials for portable, flexible and wearable electronics.”
Image: Toshiyuki Imai/Flickr
A new report by TechXplore examines a recently published review paper on the potential in nanomaterials for rechargeable lithium batteries. In the paper, lead-author and ECS member Yi Cui of Stanford University, explores the barriers that still exist in lithium rechargeables and how nanomaterials may be able to lend themselves to the development of high-capacity batteries.
When trying to design affordable batteries with high-energy densities, researchers have encountered many issues, including electrode degradation and solid-electrolyte interphase. According to the paper’s authors, possible solutions for many of these hurdles lie in nanomaterials.
Cui’s comprehensive overview of rechargeable lithium batteries and the potential of nanaomaterials in these applications came from 100 highly-reputable publications, including the following ECS published papers:
The 2015 MacArthur Foundation geniuses have just been revealed, with seven prolific scientists receiving the prestigious title. Of those scientists, inorganic chemist Peidong Yang was named as one of this year’s geniuses for his pioneering work in nanomaterials science. His work is not only transformative for the science of semiconductor nanowires and nanowire photonics, it is also opening new paths for clean, renewable energy.
More and more people are looking toward nanomaterials to help solve issues in the energy infrastructure. Not only could this technology lead to more efficient and cost effective renewable energy sources, but could also help the development of devices that remove pollutants from the air and water. In fact, nanotechnology has such a vast scope that there is potential for it to impact almost all areas of society.
“There is not a field that is not touched,” said nanomaterials expert Francis D’Souza of the University of North Texas. “It is a group of very eminent scientists exploring the possibilities in every single field. You can expect big discoveries and breakthroughs.”
While nanomaterials are infiltrating everything from electronics to biomedical applications, many scientists have shift their primary focus to energy harvesting.
“There are so many new capabilities that can be exploited with nanotechnology, from dramatic improvements to solar conversion efficiency to battery systems with higher storage capacity and faster charging and discharging cycles to miniaturized power management systems, so we can have energy storage that can last for a long time,” said IBM’s Lili Deligianni.
The 5-µm-diameter graphene balls in these scanning electron microscope images contain graphene nanosheets radiating outward from the center.
Credit: Chem. Mater.
Materials scientists have developed a new technique that could provide a simpler and more effective way to produce electrode materials for batteries and supercapacitors, which could potentially lead to devices with improved energy and power densities.
The researchers have unlocked this new battery technology by exposing tiny bits of graphene to a process that is very similar to deep-frying.
Prior to this development, scientists had difficulty using graphene in electrodes due to the difficulty encountered when processing the material. However, the researchers out of Yonsei University have learned how to harness the material’s electrical and mechanical properties while retaining its high surface are by using an alternative technique.
