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Ceramic components help make motors greener

The newest requirements for electric motors as a result of the European Energy Using Products directive came into effect in June 2011 and many manufacturers are now reviewing ways to make their products more efficient. Increasing energy efficiency through motor design is just one consideration encompassing the entire motor design process. For instance, the choice of materials can have a significant impact on efficiencies and many manufacturers are turning to ceramic components to help.

‘Women worse at math than men’ explanation scientifically incorrect, MU researchers say; popular theory debunked

A University of Missouri researcher and his colleague have conducted a review that casts doubt on the accuracy of a popular theory that attempted to explain why there are more men than women in top levels of mathematic fields. The researchers found that numerous studies claiming that the stereotype, “men are better at math” — believed to undermine women’s math performance — had major methodological flaws and used improper statistical techniques, and they say many studies had no scientific evidence of this stereotype.

The faster-than-fast Fourier transform

The fast Fourier transform, devised in the mid-1960s, made it practical to calculate Fourier transforms on the fly. Ever since the FFT was proposed, however, people have wondered whether an even faster algorithm could be found. A group of MIT researchers have found a new algorithm that, in a large range of practically important cases, improves on the fast Fourier transform. Under some circumstances, the improvement can be dramatic: a tenfold increase in speed. The new algorithm could be particularly useful for image compression, enabling, say, smartphones to wirelessly transmit large video files without draining their batteries or consuming their monthly bandwidth allotments.

Inexpensively and sustainable route to clean drinking water using naturally-functionalized antimicrobial sand (f-sand) using ‘Miracle tree’ substance

The Moringa oleifera seeds could purify and clarify water inexpensively and sustainably, scientists report. Research on the potential of a sustainable water-treatment process requiring only tree seeds and sand appears in ACS’ journal . They added an extract of the seed containing the positively charged Moringa protein, which binds to sediment and kills microbes, to negatively charged sand. The resulting functionalized sand proved effective in killing harmful E. coli bacteria and removing sediment from water samples.

Cylindrical refinement increases solar concentrator efficiency

A team of researchers at the University of California, Merced, has redesigned luminescent solar concentrators to be more efficient at sending sunlight to solar cells. The advancement could be an important breakthrough for solar energy harvesting, predicts UC Merced physics professor Sayantani Ghosh. “We tweaked the traditional flat design for luminescent solar concentrators and made them into cylinders. The results of this architectural redesign surprised us, as it significantly improves their efficiency,” he says.

Watching a gas turn superfluid: New work on ultracold gases may also help scientists understand high-temperature superconductors and neutron stars

The MIT work sheds light on the superconductivity of electrons in metals, including high-temperature superconductors that have the potential to revolutionize energy efficiency. The researchers carried out their experiment with an isotope of lithium that has an odd number of electrons, protons and neutrons. Such particles are called fermions. In order to become superfluid and flow without friction, fermions need to team up in pairs. This is what happens in superconductors, where electrons form so-called Cooper pairs, which can flow without any resistance.

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Kristin Persson is one of the experts behind the Materials Project, the new computational tool aimed at taking the guesswork out of new materials discoveries. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt, LBL.

Right after I wrote my first post on the availability of the new Materials Project computation-database-search toolkit, I belatedly learned that the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has also been playing a big role in the development and operations underlying the effort (along with MIT, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and University of Kentucky are also partners).

In fact, NERSC’s participation was right under my nose, just not in plain sight. It turns out that the center is serving as the online host for the Materials Project, a role it has taken on as part of its mission to create gateways for various science communities. Here’s a brief description NERSC provides of the gateway concept

NERSC is helping build web interfaces to access [high performance] computers and storage systems. These gateways allow scientists to access data, perform computations and interact with NERSC resources using web-based interfaces and technologies. The goal is to make it easier for scientists to use NERSC while creating collaborative tools for sharing data with the rest of the scientific community.

NERSC engages with science teams interested in using these new services, assists with deployment, accepts feedback, and tries to recycle successful approaches into methods that other teams can use.

[…]

NERSC is providing scientific groups with the building blocks to create their own science gateways and web interfaces into NERSC. Many of these interfaces are built on top of existing grid and web technologies.

[…]

Science gateways can be configured to provide public unauthenticated access to data sets and services as well as authenticated access if needed. The following features are available to projects that wish to enable gateway access to their data through the web. Other features can be made available on request.

(It’s worth noting that materials science has been on the NERSC’s radar for some time and, according to this overview (pdf) of the NERSC, has been allocating the largest chunk of its “workload”—17 percent—to materials science since 2008.)

Kristin Persson, who works at the LBL and who is described as one of the founding scientists behind the Materials Project, repeats the Google analogy I mentioned yesterday. She says in a story on the NERSC website, “Our vision is for this tool to become a dynamic ‘Google’ of material properties, which continually grows and changes as more users come on board to analyze the results, verify against experiments and increase their knowledge. So many scientists can benefit from this type of screening. … Materials innovation today is largely done by intuition, which is based on the experience of single investigators. The lack of comprehensive knowledge of materials, organized for easy analysis and rational design, is one of the foremost reasons for the long process time in materials discovery.”

In the same story, NERSC computer engineer Shreyas Cholia provides some of the history of the MP. Cholia says, “The Materials Project represents the next generation of the original Materials Genome Project, developed by [Gerbrand] Ceder’s team at MIT. The core science team worked with developers from NERSC and Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division to expand this tool into a more permanent, flexible and scalable data service built on top of rich modern web interfaces and state-of-the-art NoSQL database technology. … At NERSC, we have a long history of engaging with science teams to create web-based tools that allow scientists to share and access data, perform computations and interact with NERSC systems using web-based technologies, so it was a perfect match.”

Also, for more details on Ceder’s thoughts about high-throughput computation, density functional theory and materials development, check out this 2010 presentation (pdf) he made at the Oak Ridge National Lab.

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Abengoa, designer of novel concentrating solar power towers, is a participant in several new ARPA-E funded projects for storing thermal energy. Credit: Abengoa

Last week Eileen reported on ARPA-E’s new awards in rare-earth alternative technologies. This week I thought I would take a look at APRA-E’s $37.3 million initiative to find a disruptive thermal storage technology(ies), an effort cleverly called HEATS (high energy advanced thermal storage), all of which seem to have a novel material at their cores.

General speaking, the awards went to R&D groups working in three arenas: Large and medium-scale (utility-scale) storage systems, “thermal fuels,” and vehicular support systems.

In regard to large-scale awards, the quest is to find out if thermal storage could be used as a massive controllable and distributed load for grid stabilization. The technologies include supercritical fluids, molten salts, molten glass, metal hydrides and phase change materials.

The vehicular systems are mostly aimed at developing special “hot-cold batteries” for interior climate control to extend the mileage of an electric vehicle’s main battery pack. Some of the materials include PCMs, solid state thermal energy conversion materials and electrical metal-organic framework

Utility-scale HEATS

Navitasmax: Navitasmax, Cornell and Harvard Universities, Nano Terra and Barber-Nichols are getting $812,000 for a project, targeted at concentrating solar and nuclear applications, which involves evaluation of simple and complex supercritical fluids. They hope to show these fluids can be “tuned” to have very high heat capacity, which will provide the potential of developing low cost and efficient thermal storage.

Abengoa Solar: Abengoa Solar Inc. is getting $3.6 million to develop a new type of large-scale CSP conversion (salt?) tower and a novel thermal energy storage technology, which they predict can save 30 percent over parabolic mirror molten-salt system costs, along with higher performance. Abengoa has been developing projects based on new tower architecture, superheated steam and salt storage components

Halotechnics: This is a $3.3 million project by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne based on a low melting-point molten glass thermal storage system. Besides using abundant raw materials, the group predicts it can reduce costs by a factor of ten. It’s aimed at CSP and nuclear applications. The company, heretofore, has focused on molten salt technologies, but CEO Justin Raade says on its website, “We’ve been thrilled by the discoveries we’ve made with our molten salts and are very excited to explore the use of molten glass to reach even higher temperatures for more efficient energy storage.” It will optimize the material in order to develop a complete system to pump, heat, store and discharge the molten glass.

Pacific Northwest National Lab: PNNL’s Energy Materials Group and University of Utah will use $712,500 for a reversible high-temperature metal hydride thermal storage system exploiting recent breakthroughs. In particular, the team will try to demonstrate the desired cycle life in a reversible hydride and demonstrate an order-of-magnitude increase in storage density compared to existing systems. PNNL’s website says, “The team will first develop a metal hydride with a suitably long lifetime. If successful, they will then create a small prototype system.”

University of South Florida: USF and SunBorne Energy (a company that has tended to focus on India’s energy needs) have $2.5 million to develop a low-cost, industrially scalable system based on high-temperature phase change materials. They will use an electroless encapsulation technique (pdf) to enhance the heat transfer to overcome the low thermal conductivity of common PCMs. The proposed low-cost (75 percent reduction) system will operate at high temperatures with a small footprint. The idea is to prepare macrocapsules, from porous pellets of low-cost PCMs (salts, eutectics, metal alloys, polymers) and then encapsulate the pellets in high temperature material. Convective heat transfer would occur by submerging the PCM capsules in a liquid.

MIT: Like the project above, MIT and Boston College will use phase-change materials for high-temperature thermal energy storage. The team’s metallic composites-based PCMs will have high phase-change temperatures, high thermal conductivity values, long lifetime and low cost. The team intends to use its characterization and modeling skills to optimize the properties of these materials.

Thermal Fuels

University of Florida: With nearly $3 million, UF hopes to demonstrate a “thermal fuel,” a thermochemical fuel production system that uses a low-pressure, magnetically stabilized, nonvolatile iron oxide looping process. UF’s system uses a new dual-cavity, high-temperature chemical reactor that converts CSP to syngas with a process that uses water and recycled CO₂ as the sole feedstock.

University of Minnesota: UM, along with Caltech and Abengoa Solar Inc, says it can develop technology for a solar thermochemical reactor to make fuel production more efficient. With $3.6 million, the team is ambitiously aiming for solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies of more than 10 percent.

Vehicular Storage

University of Utah: The university, with HRL and General Motors Global R&D will use $2.7 million to demonstrate a high-density thermal battery based on metal hydrides. The thermal battery will be used for warm and cold climate control to provide heating and cooling to electric vehicles without draining the EV’s electric battery.

PNNL: PNNL’s Energy and Environment Directorate, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will be pioneering an electric-powered adsorption heat pump for EVs. Researchers will use $813,000 to develop new metal-organic frameworks with larger sorption capacities and can be regenerated electrically. The PNNL website says a heat pump based on electrical metal-organic framework material the size of a 2-liter bottle could theoretically handle the heating and cooling needs of an electric vehicle with far less impact on driving distance.

TREATS: Sheetak Inc, with partner Delphi Automotive, received one of the largest awards, nearly $4,7 million. TREATS, thermoelectric reactors for efficient automotive thermal storage, would provide EVs with a new HVAC system option that can store the energy required for heating and cooling. Sheetak has a solid state thermoelectric energy converters to recharge a dedicated hot-cold battery. The converter can also eliminate the need for an EV’s traditional compressor and heater.

University of Texas at Austin: UTA and Sinoev will use $2.5 million for R&D for a hot-cold battery. They will demonstrate a high-energy density, low-cost system based on new composite PCMs with an energy density they say is two- to three-times above the state-of-the-art PCMs for low-temperature applications.

United Technologies Research Center: UTRC and Ricardo Inc will use a $2.7 million award to demonstrate a “hybrid vapor compression adsorption” hot-cold battery system based on a metal salt that has a high mass and volumetric capacity tailored to the refrigerant.

MIT: With the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, Ford and $2.7 million, MIT hopes to demonstrate what it calls a thermo-adsorptive battery climate control system. This hot-cold battery would eliminate the vapor compression cycle, and if it works with EVs, it may be applicable to residential and commercial buildings displacing electricity consumption during peak demand times.

MIT: Based on its HybriSol Hybrid nanomaterials, MIT will use $3 million to demonstrate the use of nanostructures for high-energy-density thermal energy storage device. The HybriSol device would be rechargeable and transportable.

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Credit: Wikipedia.

According to Matt Marx, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, many engineers say noncompete agreements cause major disruptions in their careers and often force them to abandon their original vocation altogether.

In a study of 1,029 randomly selected engineers from the membership rolls of the IEEE, Marx found that nearly one-third who sign noncompete agreements shifted to jobs and industries that had little or nothing to do with their advanced degrees and skills. In an MIT news release, Marx says, ”When people take a career detour, they sometimes earn less money, lose touch with their colleagues, and their skills atrophy.”

Although many consider such agreements to be a standard practice in their field, Marx says his research shows that many engineers aren’t confronted with such agreements until after they are on the job. ”Seventy percent of people said they were informed only after they accepted the offer. Half the time it was after they showed up for work. On the first day, they enroll in a 401(k), set up direct deposit, and, oh yeah, are given this noncompete thing to sign. People get savvy as they get older, but a lot of people are blindsided by it,” he comments in the same release.

According to Marx, this blindsiding is not accidental. He says, “[F]irms strategically manage the process of getting workers to sign such contracts, waiting for workers’ bargaining position to weaken.”

One of Marx’s colleagues argues that noncompete agreements also create inefficiencies in the labor marketplace. ”It’s not a zero-sum game if you’re getting a good match between employees and firms,” says Olave Sorenson, who teaches at the Yale School of Management. “And, one of the difficulties with the noncompete agreements is that it makes it more difficult for employees to find the right firm for them.” Conversely, he notes, engineers and other high-skilled employees “are locked up in firms where they’re not creating as much value as they could elsewhere.”

Another problem Marx identifies is the patchwork quilt of state regulations and varying levels of legal enforcement and protections, which encourages out-of-state career changes.

Marx has authored a paper, “The Firm Strikes Back,” on this topic in the American Sociological Review (doi:10.1177/0003122411414822).

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The “Game”
MIT “at” Colorado School of Mines

Sometimes engineers and scientists have a tough time explaining what they do all day to outsiders. But, those who do modeling and simulation have it easy—all they have to say is that their work is like fantasy football applied to science.

Of course, fantasy football is really modeling and simulation applied to football, but a tailgate party is no place to cut definitions too finely.

This week’s NCAA games did not meet enough of my materials science selection criteria, so I decided to play “what if.” This week’s match-up is a fantasy football game featuring two highly regarded tech schools.

The Orediggers compete in the Division II Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. They started the season ranked in the D2 Top 25 Poll, but last week’s loss knocked them out of the ranking. Look for them to fight hard for a win when they travel to Western New Mexico University.

MIT debuted its varsity Div. III program in 1988 and competes in the New England Football Conference, the largest football conference in the US at 16 teams. Although, the program is relatively young, there is a rich (unsanctioned) football tradition of pranking the Harvard-Yale game when it’s played in Cambridge, Mass. The Engineers host Curry College on Saturday.

My pick? Colorado School of Mines

The “home team”
Colorado School of Mines, Metallurgical & Materials Engineering

Colorado happy hour: Students and faculty hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park after a recent Colorado Center for Advanced Ceramics symposium. Credit: Brian Gorman, Colorado School of Mines.

Engineers-at-heart will feel instantly at home at Mines, from the tech-oriented Pop Quiz on the home page, to the “Laws and Equations” tab on the MME homepage, to the flowchart (pdf) outline of the undergraduate curriculum.

The very name of the university gives away that this is a school with a rich materials tradition and an applied engineering focus. The school’s original focus on the geology, chemistry and metallurgy of gold and silver ores has evolved into today’s mission of “understanding the Earth, harnessing energy and sustaining the environment.” Indeed, the school’s tagline is “Earth-Energy-Environment.”

Likewise, the department evolved from an extractive metallurgy program into an interdisciplinary materials engineering department. The MME program at Mines is “still very much minerals based” Professor Brian Gorman says, but “We’re a traditional earth-systems engineering program that is transitioning to a more science-based program.”

The department has about 150 undergrads. Freshmen start in a pre-engineering program where they are introduced to the full spectrum of engineering choices. In addition to seminars, open houses and lab tours, students get a flavor of materials engineering at “Free Pour Friday” events in the foundry and an open slip casting lab, both run by upperclassmen (with faculty supervision).

Gorman says it is not unusual for students to be “latecomers” to the program, like fifth year senior, Blair Wendt, who transferred from chemical engineering to MME. In an email he said, “The way atoms interact with each other has always fascinated me,” and, while the chemistry of gases and liquids was interesting, “nothing compared to the interactions in the solid state.”

The department’s faculty is organized into six research centers. The centers allow faculty to share space and equipment and stretch a little more research out of their funding dollars (about $10 million per year). The Colorado Center for Advanced Ceramics is led by incoming ACerS board of directors member Ivar Reimanis, and is home to six of MME’s 21 professors.

Taking advantage of the local resource known as the Rocky Mountains, Gorman teaches a three week summer field session with day trips into the mountains to collect minerals. Using hand-hewn raw materials, students learn ceramic processing by making a triaxial whiteware. The field session has been Wendt’s favorite course so far: “It is very interactive and hands-on, and gives you a true feel for what you might be doing in the industry one day.”

Students find there are plenty of research opportunities. Wendt says of his work in Gorman’s lab, “It has allowed me to watch how a new idea grows from a small possibility into a full blown process.” Third-year student Scott Harper is working on spinels and says, “I can attribute much of what I know about processing and characterization to [my grad student mentor].”

Close ties to CoorsTek, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Colorado Fuel Cell Center and other regional high-tech concerns provide ample opportunity for internships and school-year research opportunities. Students are also placed in co-ops from “Alabama to Alaska.”

The smallish department size means students receive plenty of personalized attention. Also, Wendt shared that seeing the same 40 classmates everyday means “we’ve got tons of inside jokes. For example, this year’s graduating class has an ongoing “Wall of Shame,”" where they keep track of funny things worth remembering. An example WoS entry is the “Power Ninja,” for a student-who-shall-not-be-named who accidentally unplugged an entire bank of computers in the lab.

The department has an active Material Advantage chapter and is looking to start a Keramos chapter. Reimanis notes that student participation in a society like ACerS can help them find a “career path and do the networking” that is important in the job search process. He encourages students to tap into the Society by going to conferences, meeting people in the hallways and participating in activities like the ACerS Mug Drop Contest at MS&T.

Mines tends to attract outdoor enthusiasts, and activities like mountain biking, hiking, Ultimate Frisbee and cycling are all popular. Gorman (a native of northern Illinois) says new professors learn quickly to avoid scheduling classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or at least not on those mornings. Why not? The kids are skiing up in Loveland while the tourists are away!

It’s not too late for at least one long-graduated person to get in on the Mines experience. Gorman says the search is on for a full professor to fill the Herman F. Coors Distinguished Professor of Ceramic Engineering endowed chair.

Faculty involved in ceramic and glass research include Gorman, Reimanis, Mark Eberhart, Hongjun Liang, Ryan O’Hayre, Corrine Packard and Dennis Ready (emeritus).

The “visitors”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Materials Science & Engineering

Ice cream making demonstrates a lesson on the applications of materials science to food science during the freshmen pre-engineering program in August. Credit: DMSE, MIT

MIT’s DMSE knows what it feels like to be the defending national champs because they are the defending national champs according to the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings. For the third straight year, the department has been ranked first in the country.

The department works hard to provide an undergraduate experience that balances classroom learning and experiential learning. And, it all begins before students even begin their first year.

Now in its third year, up to 20 incoming freshmen participate in FPOP, the Freshman Pre-Orientation Program, a four-day, on-campus introduction to materials science that takes place the week before the official new student orientation week. Older students in the department pushed to get FPOP started, noting that materials science tends not to be on a high schooler’s radar. The program is a faculty-upperclassmen collaboration, with faculty providing lectures in the morning and upperclassmen following up with lab activities. The theme is the “past, present and future” of materials.

The acronymic opportunities continue throughout the undergrad years with UROP, UPOP, MADMEC and IAP. Respectively those are: Undergraduate Research Opportunities Research Program, Undergraduate Practice Opportunities, Making and Designing Materials Engineering Contest and Independent Activities Program.

The model for integrating undergrads into university research groups started about 30 years ago when MIT started UROP. Professor Yet-Ming-Chiang, an ACerS Fellow, was among the early-on participants during his MIT materials undergrad days and credits the program with sparking his love of materials science and research, “That experience is what really got me interested in research,” he said. Almost all undergrads participate at some time during their tenures, either for credit or as a part-time job. At the end of the year, UROP projects are evaluated the American Idol way, with professors rating the projects and freshmen providing the “live audience” input.

Many students hear about materials science through the department’s inorganic chemistry course, “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry,” which is taken by about 500 freshman per year. Because the course satisfies the chemistry requirement for several majors, the department goes out of its way to assign its best TAs to the course, and it has become an important vehicle for recruiting materials majors.

Prospective majors also are introduced to materials science and engineering through events during the year, including open houses and hands-on classes in January’s IAP. Materials-based IAP classes include things like casting, welding, blacksmithing and glass blowing, and enrollment priority is given to DMSE majors and freshmen.

Students at MIT choose a major at the end of their first year (also unique to MIT, first-year students are not assigned grades). The department now attracts about 50 students per class, up from 35 per class in recent years. As to the enrollment increase, Angelita Mireles, academic administrator, laughs and says “teaching and research are to blame!”

Chiang observed that the department has consistently attracted a larger proportion of women than others have. In fact, this year the undergrad enrollment is just over 50 percent women. Mireles says the larger number of women on the faculty, all of whom teach undergraduate courses, is a major factor. “Students themselves see other women, and it makes them feel a little more comfortable in the field.” Also, she said, the students recruit each other, and the department sees a lot of synergy between women working with each other.”

The junior/senior year design course is used to introduced the elements of design, although it is also used to probe material properties and teach characterization. By the end of the course, students design and execute an advanced material, device or prototype.

For students with an artistic bent and strong lungs, glassblowing classes are offered through the glass lab. The lab is its own entity, but is housed in the department with Prof. Mike Cima serving as faculty advisor. The lab is staffed by professional glassblowers and glass artists, providing students the “opportunity to learn from the very best,” says Chiang. In the 20 years, these classes have become so popular that enrollment is set by lottery. In the fall, the lab has a Great Glass Pumpkin Patch event, where over 1000 glass pumpkins and gourds are sold to the general public. This year’s event is on Oct. 1, but get there early: Last year the Patch sold out in just four hours.

The department has 34 tenure-track faculty and a supported research budget of about $40 million. Faculty involved in ceramic materials research include Chiang, Cima, Harry Tuller and Linn Hobbs. Former department head, Subra Suresh, has taken a leave of absence to head-up the National Science Foundation.

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