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Computer simulations show that metal oxides in water go through many short-lived shapes and structures (see story below). Credit: William Casey, UC Davis.

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Scorpions inspire scientists in making tougher surfaces for machinery

Researchers studied the bumps and grooves on the scorpions’ backs, scanning the creatures with a 3D laser device and developing a computer program that modeled the flow of sand-laden air over the scorpions. The team used the model in computer simulations to develop actual patterned surfaces to test which patterns perform best. At the same time, the erosion tests were conducted in the simple erosion wind tunnel for groove surface bionic samples at various impact conditions. Their results showed that a series of small grooves at a 30-degree angle to the flowing gas or liquid give steel surfaces the best protection from erosion.

US inactivity regarding strategic materials criticized at Washington hearing

At a hearing Jan. 26 before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Jeff Green testified that the US has lost critical supply chain capabilities and significant technological capital to China and that the lack of a deliberately thought-out U.S. policy for strategic and critical materials has resulted in economic and national security vulnerabilities. The hearing on “China’s Global Quest for Resources and Implications for the United States” examined Chinese efforts to acquire and manage various natural resources. Green president of the J.A. Green & Co., assists industrial clients in government relations, business development and strategic planning matters and is the former staff director to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness.

Imaging ‘invisible’ dopant atoms in semiconductor nanocrystals

In semiconductor nanocrystals, the physical effects of deliberately included impurities, called dopants, may depend on the dopant position with the crystal. To date, there has not been an effective technique to determine the location of individual dopant atoms in nanocrystals. IRG-4 researchers demonstrated that a combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy can be used to reveal the position of such “invisible” dopants.he physical effects of deliberately included impurities, called dopants, may depend on the dopant position with the crystal. To date, there has not been an effective technique to determine the location of individual dopant atoms in nanocrystals. IRG-4 researchers demonstrated that a combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy can be used to reveal the position of such “invisible” dopants.

Nano research could impact flexible electronic devices

A discovery by a research team at North Dakota State University, Fargo, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, shows that the flexibility and durability of carbon nanotube films and coatings are intimately linked to their electronic properties. The research could one day impact flexible electronic devices such as solar cells and wearable sensors.

Metal oxide simulations could help green technology

University of California, Davis, researchers have proposed a radical new way of thinking about the chemical reactions between water and metal oxides, the most common minerals on Earth. Using computer simulations and comparing the resulting animations with lab experiments they found that the behavior of an atom on the surface of the cluster can be affected by an atom some distance away. Instead of moving through a sequence of transitional forms, as had been assumed, metal oxides interacting with water fall into a variety of “metastable states” - short-lived intermediates, the researchers found.

Team develops cheaper way of separating nanotubes

Researchers in London have developed a cheaper way of producing high-quality carbon nanotubes in larger quantities than existing methods. A team from the London Center for Nanotechnology has licensed the process, which separates nanotubes into usable quantities without damaging them, to German-based industrial gases company the Linde Group. LCN’s solution was to charge the nanotubes with electrons so that they naturally repel each other, by reacting them with an alkali metal such as sodium in a solution of ammonia. This solution of separated nanotubes can then be used for manufacturing things such as composites, or the nanotubes can be precipitated out of the solution.

Collaborative learning in networks

“We found that collective exploration improved average success over independent exploration because good solutions could diffuse through the network. In contrast to prior work, however, we found that efficient networks outperformed inefficient networks, even in a problem space with qualitative properties thought to favor inefficient networks. We explain this result in terms of individual-level explore-exploit decisions, which we find were influenced by the network structure as well as by strategic considerations and the relative payoff between maxima. We conclude by discussing implications for real-world problem solving and possible extensions.”

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Congress has finalized the first three of twelve parts of the FY’12 federal budget. So far, things look relatively promising for STEM R&D. Credit: Congressional Budget Office.

In November Congress approved three parts of President Obama’s $3.5 trillion budget request for FY 2012, which began Oct. 1, 2011.

Why only three? To make the budget job more manageable, the budget is divided into 12 chunks, which the Congress considers in no particular order. A story (see article summary) in Science by Jeffrey Mervis (Nov. 25, “First Spending Bill Giveth—And Taketh Away”) breaks down what the approved-to-date budget means for the STEM R&D community.

The overall $3.5 trillion request included $148 billion for federal support of R&D, but that is spread across about two dozen federal entities. November’s three “minibus” appropriations funded the departments of Commerce, Justice, Agriculture, Transportation and Housing, as well as the independent agencies NSF, NASA and the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

While the behemoth budgets for DOE and DOD have yet to be worked on, these first three approvals bode well (enough) for the materials science R&D community. The budgets of NIST (a Commerce agency), NASA and NSF all saw increases over FY 2011. NIST’s research programs received a nice 12% increase (from $507 M to $567 M), while NSF got only a 2.5% bump (from $6.86 B to $7.03 B, but that’s enough to fund more than a few research programs).

In a surprising outcome, the OSTP, which had a puny $6.6 M FY’11 budget, took a 32% hit and received only $4.5 M for FY’12. According to Mervis’ story, this seems to be a tit-for-tat move on the part of Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), who has been squabbling with OSTP over the Obama Administration’s interactions with China regarding high-technology sectors, including space.

Mervis quotes Charles Vest, president of the US National Academy of Engineering, “OSTP sits at the center of the federal government’s thinking and planning for science and technology that are at the absolute heart of what our nation has to do to remain competitive and to lead in the 21st century.”

What it means for OSTP and its 90 employees is unclear. In the article, OSTP’s director, John Holdren, says the smaller budget “will mean a lot of belt tightening and, inevitably, some reduction in the range of domains in which OSTP maintains a major presence.”

Since they were unveiled last summer, OSTP has been the leading voice for new White House initiatives that are of keen interest to the materials science and engineering community—the Materials Genome Initiative and the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.

Cyrus Wadia, OSTP assistant director for clean energy and materials R&D, said in an email, “We do not foresee the budget cut having an impact on the MGI.” He may be right. Both the MGI and the AMP were envisioned as multi-agency, decentralized efforts, which should work to OSTP’s advantage as it adjusts to doing its job with a whole lot less.

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Daniel Shechtman’s diffraction pattern was tenfold: turning the picture a tenth of a full circle (36 degrees) results in the same pattern. Credit: Shechtman; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Daniel Shechtman, while working at NIST alongside other luminaries, such as John Cahn, set the physics and materials science world atwitter (even before Twitter!) in 1984 when Physical Review Letters (doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.1951) published a paper by him, Cahn, Denis Gratias and Ilan Blech reporting the discovery of a material that had a unique diffraction pattern (above) suggestive of a crystalline structure but apparently lacked a regularly ordered and repeating three-dimensional pattern.

The discovery reported was duly attributed to Shechtman. In 1982, he stumbled upon the phenomenon while studying an aluminum-mangnese alloy. The unexpected appearance of ten major dots in each concentric circle in the material’s diffraction pattern initially baffled Shechtman and others because it was unknown in crystallographic guides and seemed to violate the basic rules of crystallography. He followed up the initial data with other experiments that indicated the material had a five-fold symmetry, a characteristic that was thought to be impossible.

Cahn et al.’s contribution to Shechtman’s work was primarily to confirm his findings and conclusions about the existence of what came to be known as quasicrystals.

What Shechtman had discovered, in essence, in the Al-Mn alloy is that the five-fold symmetry creates an aperiodic regular “pattern” or “quasiperiodic” structure. Perhaps the easiest way to wrap one’s thinking around an regular aperiodicity is to look at the work, coincidentally done just several years before Shechtman’s discovery, by mathematicians, such as Roger Penrose, who created special mosaics with a limited number of tiles, a limitation that provides the appearance of some pattern similarities, while creating patterns that never actually repeat (see example, below). A Fibonacci sequence is another familiar example of regular aperiodicity.

Pentagonal aperiodic tiling by Roger Penrose using only two sizes of tiles. Identifying the vertices as atomic positions generates a quasiperiodic structure. Credit: R. Penrose; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The work of Penrose and others eventually provided Shechtman (and others who joined the investigation of quasicrystals) an explanation of how the material might actually be structured.

Shechtman’s assertions made him an outcast for a few years, but his dogged pursuit of an explanation of his findings eventually put him ahead of other researchers who, as it turns out, had observed similar patterns and data but had too-hastily dismissed the diffractions as being the result of twinned or intermingled crystals.

Background material provided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reports that hundreds of different types of quasicrystals have now been synthesized and that at least one natural mineral has been found to have that structure. Here is what the Academy says about the uses of quasicrystals:

When trying out different blends of metal, a Swedish company managed to create [a] steel with many surprisingly good characteristics. Analyses of its atomic structure showed that it consists of two different phases: hard steel quasicrystals embedded in a softer kind of steel. The quasicrystals function as a kind of armor. This steel is now used in products such as razor blades and thin needles made specifically for eye surgery.

Despite being very hard, quasicrystals can fracture easily, like glass. Due to their unique atomic structure, they are also bad conductors of heat and electricity, and have non-stick surfaces. Their poor thermal transport properties may make them useful as so-called thermoelectric materials … Today, scientists also experiment with quasicrystals in surface coatings for frying pans, in components for energy-saving light-emitting diodes, and for heat insulation in engines, among other things.

Here’s a great 2010 interview with Shechtman, who now works at Technion:

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NIST Extends Response Period for Comments on Proposed New Advanced Manufacturing Program

To accommodate additional interested parties, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today announced a 30-day extension on a request seeking public comment on the proposed new Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia program. The comment period now ends 11:59 p.m., Eastern Time, on Thursday, Oct. 20, 2011. The Request For Information asks interested parties to answer 23 questions about eligibility for consortia membership, selection criteria for research funds, best practices for maximizing small business participation or disseminating results, and a number of other topics. Comments will be accepted by email only to AMtechRFC@nist.gov. All comments will be made publicly available.

DOE and Israel Announce $3.1 Million in Cooperative Clean Energy Projects

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today highlighted a milestone in U.S.-Israel cooperation on clean energy technology. DOE and the Ministry of National Infrastructures of Israel (MNI) have selected four projects in California, Pennsylvania, and Washington to receive $3.1 million under the 2011 Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Energy program. Each of the cooperative projects includes a U.S. and Israeli partner and addresses energy challenges and opportunities of interest to both countries, while focusing on commercializing clean energy technologies that improve our economic competitiveness, create jobs, and support innovative companies. The selected projects will leverage private sector cost-share for a total project value of $8.46 million.

GE, Nissan Sign R&D Agreement to Fast Track Broader Adoption of Electric Cars

GE and Nissan have signed a two-year research collaboration to speed up the development of a reliable, robust smart charging infrastructure to fuel mass market adoption of electric cars like the Nissan LEAF and have identified two key focus areas for the research efforts. The first relates to the integration of electric vehicles with homes and buildings. The second looks at electric vehicle charging dynamics and the future impact on the grid once millions of electric cars are on the road.

Copper nanowire organization method could mean cheaper substitute for ITO films

Duke University chemist Ben Wiley and his graduate student have developed a technique to organise copper atoms to form long, thin, non-clumped nanowires. The nanowires are then transformed into transparent, conductive films and coated onto glass or plastic for applications in displays on mobile phones, e-readers and iPads. They could also be utilized to build foldable electronics and improved solar cells, according to new research.

 The research shows that the copper nanowire films have the same properties as those currently used in electronic devices and solar cells, but are less expensive to manufacture.

Development of Sensor Device Using High-transparency Organic Piezoelectric Film

Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has developed a sensor device using high-transparency organic piezoelectric film. This film has the following characteristics: (1) high piezoelectric output constant*1; (2) high transparency (light beam transmittance of 98% or higher [according to the internal haze measurement]); and (3) free from pyroelectric effect*2. As smartphones, tablet computers, and portable game devices become more widespread, there is a growing demand for a new human/machine interface. Conventional piezoelectric films are usually subject to a pyroelectric effect, which is a disadvantage because they cannot detect bending and twisting vibrations separately from changes in temperature. Murata has developed a high-transparency piezoelectric film free from pyroelectric effect through joint research with Kansai University and Mitsui Chemicals Inc.

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NexTech’s 10 µm MCO coating on SS441 substrate 900°C, 200 hours, air. Credit: NexTech.

Here’s what we are hearing:

PPG to increase global production capacity for precipitated silica

PPG Industries announced that it is increasing its global precipitated silica production capacity by more than 18,000 tons per year in response to growing global demand. The capacity expansion includes projects at PPG’s Lake Charles, La., and Delfzijl, Netherlands, manufacturing locations. PPG pioneered the development of synthetic precipitated silica, becoming one of the first manufacturers to bring them to market in the 1930s. Today, PPG’s silica products business is a global leader in the manufacture of precipitated silica for tire, battery separator, carrier, coatings, industrial rubber, footwear and silicone end-use applications. The business also makes TESLIN substrate, a microporous sheet material used for card, specialty print, in-mold graphic, tag and label use, as well as technology-focused applications such as e-Passports and RFID cards and labels.

Altair board appoints H. Frank Gibbard president and CEO; Stephen B. Huang to be vice president and CFO

Gibbard has more than 30 years of experience in battery and fuel cell businesses, having served as vice president for research, Development and advanced engineering at Duracell and as CEO of the fuel cell company H Power Corp. At H Power he led a $104 million IPO that resulted in a NASDAQ listing in 2000. He holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the MIT and is a frequent speaker at technical and business conferences on electrochemical energy storage. Huang is a seasoned financial executive with 18 years of experience with U.S. companies, ranging from controller to CFO. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and experienced in the financial management of joint US-Chinese companies. His experience in setting up and managing operations in China is particularly valuable for Altair’s expansion in global markets.

Mettler Toledo issues new white paper on transfer of weighing data for process control

Mettler Toledo is pleased to issue a new white paper that provides points to consider when defining operating boundaries, and data objectives for transfer of weighing process data to PLC, MES or ERP systems. Efficient transfer of weighing process data to higher level PLC, MES or ERP systems makes manufacturing processes more efficient and more transparent. It can result in more accurate or faster filling and control processes. Increased transparency can improve asset use, reduce operating costs, and make complying with certification standards or industrial regulations easier. But identifying and implementing the most effective system for data transfer and integration can be challenging.

NexTech Materials demonstrates stainless steel protective coatings for 40,000+ hours of operation in SOFCs

A critical challenge in the commercialization of solid oxide fuel cells is the selection and manufacture of components that will last for thousands of hours, but at an economical cost. NexTech Materials Ltd. has performed accelerated stability tests that predict a service life of over 40,000 hours at 750°C for low cost ferritic steel (AL 441 HP) interconnect components protected by its manganese-cobalt spinel. coatings. This achievement represents a critical milestone for intermediate temperature solid oxide fuel cells. To date, SOFC system lifetime has been limited by the metal component oxidation. As demonstrated by NexTech, MCO protective coatings reduce the oxidation rate of ferritic steels by a factor of twenty or more.

Momentive To Expand Specialty Quartz Plant in Geesthacht, Germany

Momentive Performance Materials Inc.’s Quartz & Ceramics is expanding its specialty quartz production facility in Geesthacht, Germany. The $14 million expansion project t will enable Momentive to meet increasing global demand for its high-purity specialty fused quartz crucibles, used by the photovoltaic industry to produce solar wafers and the semiconductor industry in the production of computer chips. The company manufactures a variety of specialty products that are essential to the photovoltaic wafer and semiconductor microchip production, including fused quartz crucibles used to “grow” silicon ingots, large-diameter fused quartz tubing, rods, and solid ingot in which silicon wafers are processed to make microchips.

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