Archive for the ‘Materials Science’ Category
The burgeoning use of metamaterials in the optical field is not based on the limited set of materials existing in nature, but artificial constructs whose designs let you control many properties of light. These metamaterials are artificial structures simple substances but complex, which is designed to exhibit properties not easily occur in nature.
In its last series of experiments, a team of engineers at Duke University has shown that a metamaterial developed by them is able to create holograms (three-dimensional images that are perceived as some logos with a 3D effect on credit cards). However, in the case of this new metamaterial, holograms are not seen in the band of visible light but in the infrared rays, which has never before been achieved.
Although this development has been achieved in a specific wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, the principles used to design and create the metamaterial in their experiments should be applicable to the light control in the majority of frequencies. Read the rest of this entry »
A team of engineers has developed a low-cost, single-step to make a polymer with unique properties: seen in white light, has the color of a rainbow, reflecting light in many different wavelengths.
Used as a filter for light, this material could form the basis for the design of new portable devices for multispectral imaging, able to help identify the “true color” of the objects examined.
This portable technology could have applications in a wide range of fields, from the decor, allowing precise identification colors that combine well to biomedical image processing, to help detect diseases by analyzing colors in such images. Read the rest of this entry »
The progress of the metamaterial in nanotechnology has made the invisibility cloak, a concept that belonged exclusively to fantasy and science fiction, become a reality: you can make the light waves to blurring the object that you want to hide, in such a way that this object does not exist.
This concept applies not only to electromagnetic waves but can also be transferred to other types of waves, such as sound.
It has now been successfully demonstrated for the first time an invisibility cloak for elastic waves. These waves appear, among many other sites on the strings of a guitar and the drum heads. Read the rest of this entry »
Window glass, and even eyeglasses, which never need to clean up because these have the ability to cleanse. It seems somewhat unique to science fiction, but is a breakthrough that is now about to be achieved for a practical level, beyond laboratory prototypes.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and Darmstadt Technical University, both institutions in Germany, have produced a special clear layer of glass. Neither water nor the oil achieved a foothold in this layer.
This capability is maintained even when the layer something damaged. The material should this property to its nanostructure. Surfaces coated in this way could be useful in any place where pollution or even a film of water may be harmful or simply annoying. Read the rest of this entry »
The clothes that take stitched electronics or it is in itself, is ceasing to be an exclusive issue of science fiction. With every advance is recorded in this field, such unique garments are increasingly closer to having practical uses beyond its feasibility demonstrations conducted in laboratories.
The international team of Juan Hinestroza, fiber expert at Cornell University in United States, has developed transistors using natural cotton fibers.
Make transistors from cotton fibers may be a promising new way to properly integrate electronics and textiles, to enable you to create electronic devices used as part of clothing or clothes itself be complete. Read the rest of this entry »
Carbon nanotubes and graphene-based materials promise to revolutionize the next few years the field of materials science, and find many applications in various industrial sectors, some revolutionary. Now, in a new and fascinating first, has invented hybrid carbon material, which, among other features, combined graphene and carbon nanotubes of a single wall.
The new material, whose structure is worked on the nanoscale, it can be described as graphene nanoribbons encapsulated within carbon nanotubes of a single wall, and is the work of researchers at the Aalto University in Finland and Umea University in Sweden.
The carbon nanotubos of a single wall have a hollow interior space, which was used by Albert Nasibulin (Aalto University) and colleagues as a kind of one-dimensional chemical reactor. An interesting property of this space is that it produces chemical reactions in a different way than is typical under normal conditions in three dimensions. Read the rest of this entry »
It has managed to manufacture synthetic crystals whose structures and properties are similar to those of natural biominerals like those of the shells. This achievement could be an important step in the development of high performance materials that can be manufactured in respectful manner with the environment.
The biological minerals or biominerals are very common in nature. There are structures such as bones, teeth and shells of molluscs, and often exhibit extraordinary properties and shapes compared to synthetic counterparts. A key feature is that biominerals are composite materials made of inorganic minerals such as calcium carbonate and a small amount of organic material, usually a protein. Read the rest of this entry »
A new class of material can be made invisible in the terahertz range of objects coated with it. Although this design can not be translated into an invisibility cloak for visible light, the underlying technology may have applications in fields as diverse as communications, the medical diagnosis and public safety.
The coat, designed by Cheng Sun, a professor of mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in the United States, is based on a special class of materials to manipulate the reflection and refraction of light. Read the rest of this entry »
Often, scientists find strange and unexpected things when analyzing materials at the nanoscale, or own scale of individual atoms and molecules. This happens even with the most common materials, such as water.
A good example is the following: for a couple of years, has been observed through scientific research, the water flows spontaneously within tiny graphite or graphene tubes known as carbon nanotubes.
This unexpected phenomenon is interesting because carbon nanotubes are a promising component for many devices in the new fields of nanofluidic and nanofiltration. A potential application of nanotubes is to be able to help maintain extremely small or separate streams of water impurities. Read the rest of this entry »
Manufacture, from graphite oxide, a full supercapacitor has proven to be a simple task. But until a laboratory deduced how to do this production, it seemed very difficult and intricate.
The team of Pulickel Ajayan and Wei Gao, Rice University, discovered that it was feasible to transform a sheet of graphite oxide in a supercapacitor functional recording special patterns on it with a laser.
Scientists already knew that the heat of a laser could make graphite oxide (the oxidized form of graphite) in a variety of it is an electrical conductor.
By special patterns thus conductive graphite oxide, thin films recorded on this material, researchers at Rice University made these films in supercapacitors, capable of storing and releasing energy for thousands of cycles. Read the rest of this entry »