Materials Sciences

Studies may help identify best materials for variety of future electronics applications

Flexible displays that can be folded up in your pocket? More accurate biological and chemical sensors? Biocompatible electronics? In research that may help determine the best materials for a wide range of future electronics applications, a scientist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory will report on the intrinsic electronic properties of molecular organic crystals

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are taking a new approach to “filling up” a fuel cell car with a nanoscale solid, hydrogen storage material. Their discovery could hasten a day when our vehicles will run on hydrogen-powered, environmentally friendly fuel cells instead of gasoline engines.

The challenge, of course, is how to store and carry hydrogen. Whatever the method, it needs to be no heavier and take up no more space than a

Materials scientists and engineers at Northwestern University are developing a new “high-security” steel that would be resistant to bomb blasts such as the one that struck — and nearly sank — the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The researchers now have a state-of-the-art instrument that enables them to get a precise look at steel’s composition on the nanoscale: a $2 million atom-probe tomograph that is only the fourth of its kind in the world.

Using the new Local-Electrode Ato

PNNL-led group controls loading of functional ’anchor’ molecules on carbon nanotubes without encumbering tubes’ strength, conductivity

Touch the tines of a tuning fork and it goes silent. Scientists have faced a similar problem trying to harness the strength and conductivity of carbon nanotubes, regarded as material of choice for the next generation of everything from biosensors to pollution-trapping sponges.

Leonard Fifield, a staff scientist at the Depart

Research into making the emerging nanomaterial industry environmentally sustainable is showing promise in a preliminary engineering study conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Rice University.

Under the auspices of the Rice University Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers have been investigating the potential environmental impact of nanomaterial waste. Specifically, they want to kn

North Carolina scientists have found that “thinnest” is not necessarily “best” in rating structure and function of carbon nanotubes, the molecule-sized cylinders that show promise for futuristic technology scaled at a billionths of a meter.

During an American Chemical Society national meeting, researchers at Duke University and Xintek, Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C., will report on the synthesis and testing of a new class of nanotubes made up of two to five layers of carbon