Lifeboat Foundation

Fusion energy has the potential to be an effective clean energy source, as its reactions generate incredibly large amounts of energy. Fusion reactors aim to reproduce on Earth what happens in the core of the sun, where very light elements merge and release energy in the process. Engineers can harness this energy to heat water and generate electricity through a steam turbine, but the path to fusion isn’t completely straightforward.

Parachutes have many applications, decelerating everything from skydivers to supersonic-speed scientific payloads. Regardless of what a parachute is slowing down, two things remain constant: the parachute must withstand large amounts of force, and it is crucial to ensuring the safety of whatever it’s carrying. To choose parachute materials that do their jobs effectively, it’s important to fully understand what happens while a parachute is opening and on its way down.

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology researchers Cutler Phillippe, Francesco Panerai and Laura Villafañe Roca have used computed tomography scans to study the fiber-scale properties of parachute textiles and link them to larger-scale behavior. Their work is published in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Journal.

“We know generally how a textile impacts the performance of the parachute,” said Phillippe, a graduate student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “But we don’t know from an experimental standpoint how that performance is related to the individual fiber motions within the textile as well as the dynamic properties of, for example, a bundle of fibers.”

Active electronics — components that can control electrical signals — usually contain semiconductor devices that receive, store, and process information.

Researchers produced 3D-printed, semiconductor-free logic gates, which perform computations in active electronic devices. As they don’t require semiconductor materials, they represent a step toward 3D printing an entire active electronic device.

Imagine tires that charge a vehicle as it drives, streetlights powered by the rumble of traffic, or skyscrapers that generate electricity as the buildings naturally sway and shudder.

These energy innovations could be possible thanks to researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developing environmentally friendly materials that produce electricity when compressed or exposed to vibrations.

In a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications, the team developed a polymer film infused with a special chalcogenide perovskite compound that produces electricity when squeezed or stressed, a phenomenon known as the piezoelectric effect. While other piezoelectric materials currently exist, this is one of the few high-performing ones that does not contain lead, making it an excellent candidate for use in machines, infrastructure as well as bio-medical applications.

This non-toxic piezoelectric material generates electricity from movement or vibration.

This lead-free polymer film can eliminate the need of batteries in many smart devices and turn roads into charging stations.

Continue reading “This magical film can produce electricity from anything that moves” »

Researchers have discovered how the “edge of chaos” can help electronic chips overcome signal losses, making chips simpler and more efficient.

By using a metallic wire on a semi-stable material, this method allows for long metal lines to act like superconductors and amplify signals, potentially transforming chip design by eliminating the need for transistor amplifiers and reducing power usage.

Revolutionizing chip design with the edge of chaos.

In their previous research, Mak and his colleagues engineered a highly tunable moiré Kondo lattice system based on MoTe₂/WSe₂ moiré bilayers. This material offers a unique opportunity to examine the Kondo destruction transition in a continuous manner, which has proved highly challenging in bulk heavy fermion materials.

“With this background, our Nature Physics paper studied the fate of the heavy fermions by continuously tuning the density of the itinerant carriers in the system, which tunes the effective Kondo coupling strength,” said Mak. “Near a critical density, we observed a destruction of the heavy fermions and the simultaneous emergence of a ferromagnetic Anderson insulator.”

As part of their new study, the researchers examined the Kondo lattice physics emerging in the moiré semiconductor: angle-aligned MoTe₂/WSe₂ heterobilayer presented in their previous paper. Their results highlight the promise of moiré Kondo lattices for studying the Kondo destruction transition using a tunable platform, as well as the possibility of realizing other exotic states of matter near such transition.

Discover the revolutionary world of 4D printing technology and its potential to transform industries with self-adaptive, intelligent materials.

Optical anti-counterfeiting technology, as a preventive measure, has deeply permeated our daily lives. Visually readable codes designed based on optical materials are widely used due to their ease of verification, reasonable cost, and difficulty in replication. The rapid development of modern technology and the increasingly rampant activities of counterfeiting pose greater challenges to optical anti-counterfeiting technology. Consequently, optical anti-counterfeiting material systems based on multimodal integrated applications have garnered widespread attention.