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Category: materials – Page 194

Nanotechnology Repairs Engine Damage in Cars

NASA

That spot of oil on the garage floor dripping from your engine indicates a problem. It’s so small that you put off going to the mechanic, until you hear a new noise and the oil pressure warning light goes off. The bad news is that one of the bearings in the crankshaft is the source of the issue. Due to wear, the normally round part is now more elliptical in shape. Some of the metal has worn away, landing you with a costly repair.

This kind of wear on engine components is common because of friction, and it happens in all machinery with moving parts. Lubricants that reduce friction can only delay and minimize this inevitable damage. The idea of reversing that wear by fixing a worn part was the dream of Washington State University PhD candidate Pavlo “Pasha” Rudenko, who decided to research using smart nanoparticles to replace eroded material.

Physicists Startled To Discover a New Way To Shape a Material’s Atomic Structure With Light

X-ray laser experiments show that intense light distorts the structure of a thermoelectric material in a unique way, opening a new avenue for controlling the properties of materials.

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity and vice versa, and their atomic structures are closely related to how well they perform.

Now researchers have discovered how to change the atomic structure of a highly efficient thermoelectric material, tin selenide, with intense pulses of laser light. This result opens a new way to improve thermoelectrics and a host of other materials by controlling their structure, creating materials with dramatic new properties that may not exist in nature.

Scientists create a fabric that can hear

Scientists have created a piece of fabric that can hear.

The new study reimagines the response of fabric to sound, however. Researchers made it out of a material that turns any movement of the fabric into an electrical signal – and it can do that with sounds.

In testing, the fabric was able to pick up a wide variety of sounds, vibrating in proportion with the noises that happened around it. “This shows that the performance of the fiber on the membrane is comparable to a handheld microphone,” said Grace Noel, a co-author on the paper.

They then wove that acoustic fabric into more traditional yarns, creating a piece of textile that could be draped and washed just like a traditional fabric.

How Graphene will Save Moore’s Law

While many say that Moore’s Law is dead, scientists are hard at work discovering new semiconductor materials which will help increase CPU and GPU performance well into the 2030’s right on track of Moore’s Laws exponential properties. Companies such as TSMC and Intel could use Graphene to make the smallest possible transistors and much improve their efficiency as electricity prices skyrocket. 2nm or 1nm processors might soon come out.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 The Revival of Moore’s Law.
01:15 Smallest Transistor ever made.
03:54 What actually are transistors?
05:49 Moore’s Law Is Dead?
07:55 Last Words.
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#cpu #mooreslaw #graphene

Future cities could be 3D Printed using Recycled Glass

Future cities could be 3D printed – using concrete made with recycled glass.

3D printed concrete may lead to a shift in architecture and construction. Because it can be used to produce new shapes and forms that current technologies struggle with, it may change the centuries-old processes and procedures that are still used to construct buildings, resulting in lower costs and saved time.

Scientists Discover Promising New Electrolyte for Solid-State Lithium-Ion Batteries

New battery material offers promise for the development of all-solid batteries.

In the quest for the perfect battery, scientists have two primary goals: create a device that can store a great deal of energy and do it safely. Many batteries contain liquid electrolytes, which are potentially flammable.

As a result, solid-state lithium-ion batteries, which consist of entirely solid components, have become increasingly attractive to scientists because they offer an enticing combination of higher safety and increased energy density — which is how much energy the battery can store for a given volume.