Materials @materialsscienceandengineering - Tumblr Blog

DEEP installs Vanguard habitat at Tennessee Reef

The subsea habitat is the first open-ocean deployment of its kind in the United States in 40 years, with parts produced using DEEP's WAAM service to contain program costs

Ocean engineering firm DEEP has completed installation of Vanguard, its pilot subsea human habitat, on the seafloor at Tennessee Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The company claims it is the first open-ocean subsea human habitat built, tested and deployed in the United States in 40 years. The habitat sits 17 meters (56 feet) below the sea surface and is designed to house up to four aquanauts for missions of five days or longer. First open-ocean deployment in 40 years DEEP has moved into sea acceptance testing and commissioning, the final steps before classification by DNV, the maritime classification society that has advised on the design and build. Crew training will follow, ahead of research missions expected to cover coral reef restoration, reef monitoring, climate impact studies, human performance research and extreme-environment training.

When you go to the doctor for a routine medical exam or a prenatal check-up, they often use an ultrasound or an X-ray to see what's happenin

When you go to the doctor for a routine medical exam or a prenatal check-up, they often use an ultrasound or an X-ray to see what's happening inside your body without needing surgery. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), researchers are doing essentially the same thing, but for the nation's nuclear power plants. With nondestructive evaluation (NDE), PNNL experts use advanced sensors and imaging to "see" through solid steel and concrete. This allows them to detect significant cracks that are otherwise invisible or monitor material health without damaging the components they are testing. It is a critical line of defense for a nuclear fleet that provides nearly 20% of the nation's electricity.

New analysis links long-ambiguous carbon defect peaks to specific atomic structures, helping improve material design for energy and electron

(Nanowerk News) The performance and applications of carbon materials are tightly related to their structural characteristics, especially the types and distribution of defects. However, defect structures at the atomic level have long been regarded as a ‘black box’ in carbon science. Now, researchers from Japan have shed light on these structural mysteries. By integrating advanced spectroscopy with computer simulations, they precisely identified the atomic configurations responsible for key defect peaks, paving the way for advanced materialengineering. Carbon materials, such as carbon fibers and activated carbons, are essential across a wide variety of fields, encompassing everything from aerospace engineering to fuel cells and thermal insulation. For decades, Raman, infrared, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) have been the primary tools used to analyze carbon materials.

MAD³ Manufacturing Revolution

Sandia team aims to get powerful AI software into companies’ hands

Newswise — ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — When Sandia National Laboratories researchers Hojun Lim and David Montes de Oca Zapiain began working on software to accelerate materials simulations, they started with just an idea. Now, eight years later, they have award-winning, ready-to-use software they believe can revolutionize manufacturing. Materials Data Driven Design, or MAD³ combines machine learning and materials science to predict, in minutes, how metals deform in real-world manufacturing scenarios. It’s a tool they say could have a major impact on automotive, aerospace and metal manufacturing as well as academia and research labs. “It’s exciting to take something that was developed from the research scope and see it transition all the way to a ready-to-use product,” Montes de Oca Zapiain said.

Croom Medical brings patient-specific implant manufacturing in-house

Company claims implant turnaround cut from weeks to days, as additive manufacturing capacity expands with tantalum and lattice platforms

Croom Medical has begun producing patient-specific implants for orthopedic OEMs entirely within its own Limerick site, rather than routing the work through outside suppliers. The Irish company claimed the shift delivers a complete, inspected implant within days, compared with the weeks or months a multi-supplier chain can take. Croom reported that the implants, produced in titanium, cobalt chrome and tantalum, suit complex, low-volume devices such as ankle implants, acetabular cups, interbody cages, revision cones, post-traumatic reconstruction devices and craniomaxillofacial implants.

Repairing Damage in Minutes: Rowan Researchers Advance Composite Repair

Study shows polymer cold spray can restore up to 80% of strength in damaged composite materials while dramatically reducing repair time

Newswise — Rowan University researchers have demonstrated a new method for repairing damage in advanced composite materials, offering a faster, more effective alternative to conventional repair techniques used in industries such as aerospace, automotive, infrastructure, maritime and energy production. In a recent study published in the Journal of Thermal Spray Technology, a multidisciplinary Rowan-led team investigated the use of polymer cold spray to restore the strength of glass fiber-reinforced polymer composites after impact damage. These lightweight materials are widely used for their strength and durability but are vulnerable to impact-induced damage that can reduce performance and lead to catastrophic failure over time.

A rapid synthesis method could speed discovery of cheaper, multi-metal catalysts for fuel cells, batteries, and other clean energy uses.

(Nanowerk News) A University at Buffalo-led team of researchers has developed a method for producing advanced nanoparticles that could accelerate the discovery of new materials for energy and electronic applications. The study, published in Nature Communications ("Non-equilibrium reducing flame aerosol process to create supported high-entropy alloy nanoparticles") under the journal’s early access policy, introduces a one-step process that rapidly combines multiple metals into uniform nanoparticles in just milliseconds. This allows researchers to quickly produce and explore a wider range of material combinations than was previously possible.

CU Boulder researchers find seaweed derivative makes earthen materials viable for 3D printing

Food-grade biopolymer alters clay particle behavior, opening a path for construction waste to become printable building material

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have identified sodium alginate — a seaweed-derived compound used in food manufacturing — as an additive that makes natural earthen materials like clay and sand suitable for extrusion-based 3D printing. “From termite mounds to adobe buildings, humans and animals have been building with earth since the dawn of time,” said Wil Srubar, Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at CU Boulder. “But there hasn’t been a lot of science to how earthen builders design the materials. So, we wanted to use scientific knowledge and tools to understand it.”

Sub-1 nm chip tech stacks transistors vertically, letting more compute fit in less space while improving speed and efficiency.

(Nanowerk News) IBM unveiled a major semiconductor breakthrough with the introduction of the world’s first sub-1 nanometer (nm) chip technology, featuring a revolutionary transistor architecture at the 0.7 nm, or 7 angstrom node. The achievement marks a landmark moment for an industry facing the physical limits of traditional chip scaling. Semiconductors play critical roles in everything from computing, to appliances, to communication devices, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure.

Temperature Tunes Plastic Waste Upcycling

Newswise — Using phosphoric acid-activated walnut shell biochar as a catalyst, the study found that a catalytic bed temperature of 350 °C produced the highest olefin selectivity, reaching 69%, while 400 °C promoted more aromatic formation and generated carbon deposits that were easier to remove. Waste plastic mulch film is widely used in agriculture but is difficult to manage after use because it persists in soil, degrades slowly, and can release pollutants if treated improperly. Chemical recycling, especially pyrolysis, has attracted growing interest because it can convert long-chain polyolefin plastics into fuels, monomers, and other useful chemicals. Microwave-assisted pyrolysis offers additional advantages for low-thermal-conductivity materials such as low-density polyethylene films, including rapid heating and improved energy transfer. However, catalyst deactivation caused by tar and coke deposition remains a major obstacle, and previous studies have not fully linked catalytic temperature, product selectivity, tar chemistry, and regeneration behavior.

MXene-polymer bonding lets a thin underwater absorber tune resonance and damping chemically, shifting acoustic control from structure to mat

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Materials that absorb underwater sound are built to solve a practical wave-control problem: reduce reflection, suppress noise, and manage acoustic signals in water. That matters for sonar, underwater communication, detection systems, marine equipment, and acoustic stealth for underwater platforms, such as submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles. The difficulty is that water carries sound efficiently, while many solid materials send much of that sound back instead of letting it enter and dissipate. Acoustic metamaterials address this problem by making compact materials interact with sound in ways ordinary absorbers cannot. They use designed internal structures to create resonances, slow sound, match acoustic impedance, or concentrate vibration where it can be dissipated.

Researchers at the University of Delaware are advancing the future of lunar construction by developing building materials made from simulate

Newswise — Building material samples from the University of Delaware spent six months mounted outside of the International Space Station, where the harsh conditions of low Earth orbit tested their limits. Some returned with higher measured strength than identical samples stored on Earth. The findings are a promising sign for the long-term goal of building infrastructure on the moon. There are no lunar supply yards, and transporting building materials from Earth would be prohibitively expensive. The solution may lie underfoot, in the form of lunar dust known as regolith. “Regolith is essentially a clay-like silicate material,” said Norman Wagner, Unidel Robert L. Pigford Chair in Chemical Engineering. “It is one of the most abundant materials on both Earth and the moon, which makes it interesting for construction.”

Minimal Matter uses 3D printed terracotta to explore biology-inspired construction

Designer Rameshwari Jonnalagedda applies minimal surface mathematics to clay additive manufacturing, producing modular architectural forms designed to age, colonize, and adapt

Designer Rameshwari Jonnalagedda has developed Minimal Matter, a system of 3D printed terracotta modules that draws on the mathematics of minimal surfaces — geometries found in soap films, leaf veins, and cellular membranes — to produce architectural components capable of functioning as thermal surfaces, ecological habitats, or structural elements depending on how the geometry is configured. The project received recognition in the Young Talents category at the Design Intelligence Award. Material behavior over product logic Where most construction materials are engineered to resist change over time, Minimal Matter is designed to accommodate it. Each terracotta module is porous and open-structured, intended to host moss, insects, air, and light. Rather than degrading with exposure, the forms are conceived to become more fully realized as living matter takes hold. The system treats biological colonization not as a failure mode but as part of the material’s long-term performance.

UCLA develops zinc-ion hybrid battery storing seven times more energy

A honeycomb carbon electrode built with UV-laser 3D resin printing drives an energy density leap in zinc-based storage technology

A research team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has used additive manufacturing to produce a 3D printed carbon electrode that increases the charge capacity of a zinc-ion hybrid battery by more than seven times, compared with existing devices of the same type. The work, published in the journal Small, also introduced a 3D printed test cell designed to improve the consistency of performance measurements in energy storage research.

The Third Wave of Critical Minerals is Reshaping Global Power

As governments race to secure minerals for clean energy, AI, defense, and manufacturing, this study reveals how “criticality” has become a powerful political tool for reshaping markets, trade rules, and global resource governance.

A recent study in the Leiden Journal of International Law examines how the discourse on critical minerals has evolved over the past century in response to shifting geopolitical, economic, and security priorities. The study shows that criticality extends beyond geological scarcity and is strongly influenced by political priorities, national security concerns, industrial policy objectives, and claims about US hegemony. Overall, the analysis highlights the growing influence of critical minerals on industrial policy, supply-chain planning, international trade, and the politics of the energy transition.

Researchers' approach captures subtle atomic patterns, improving predictions of material properties.

(Nanowerk News) Companies working at the frontier of aerospace, energy, and computing are constantly looking for new materials to improve performance. But in order to understand how those materials will actually behave once they’re inside rockets or on computer chips, companies first have to make the material and then test it. That’s because even the most powerful simulation techniques struggle to model the complex chemical arrangements in most of today’s solid materials. The problem adds costs and time to materials innovation. Now a team of MIT researchers has created a way to accurately model the behavior of metals, regardless of the complexity of their chemical arrangement. At the center of the approach are machine-learning models that make simulations of materials faster and more accurate. The researchers improved those models by building training datasets that capture the diversity of atomic environments in chemically disordered materials.

A UV laser and 3D printer create large flexible tactile sensor arrays directly on target surfaces, simplifying fabrication and rapid prototy

(Nanowerk News) Korean researchers have secured flexible electronic skin technology that can be fabricated directly in the field (npj Flexible Electronics, "Scalable in-situ fabrication of multimodal electronic skin for intelligent robotics and interactive systems"). This achievement has further increased the feasibility of commercializing electronic skin for use in various fields, including robots and wearable devices. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that, in collaboration with the research team of Professor Ahn Jun Seong from the Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering at Korea University's Sejong Campus, it has developed an in-situ process-based electronic skin fabrication technology capable of producing large-area multimodal sensors without a cleanroom, a dedicated semiconductor clean-processing facility.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Materials