The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding a new Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) at the University of Bayreuth. The interdisciplinary research of nanostructured functional materials is expected to revolutionize the performance of batteries, solar cells, fuel cells and photocatalysts, thereby opening new perspectives for a sustainable energy economy. The starting... Read more →

A research team in Korea has synthesized metal nanoparticles that can significantly improve the performance of hydrogen fuel cell catalysts by using the semiconductor manufacturing technology. The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that the research team led by Dr. Sung Jong Yoo of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell... Read more →

UC Santa Cruz chemists have developed a simple method to make aluminum nanoparticles that split water and generate hydrogen gas rapidly under ambient conditions. The water-splitting reaction does not require an applied potential and functions at ambient conditions and neutral pH to rapidly generate 130 mL (5.4 mmol) of hydrogen... Read more →

Researchers led by Andreas Stierle at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) have laid the foundations for an alternative method for storing hydrogen, using iridium-seeded palladium nanocluster superlattices with 1.2 nanometer cluster diameters. The team, which also includes researchers from the Universities of Cologne and Hamburg, published its findings in the journal ACS... Read more →

Scientists from Honda Research Institute USA (HRI-US) have synthesized atomically thin nanoribbons—atomic scale thickness, ribbon-shaped materials—that have broad implications for the future of quantum electronics, the area of physics dealing with the effects of quantum mechanics on the behavior of electrons in matter. HRI-US’s synthesis of an ultra-narrow two-dimensional material... Read more →

E-magy, a Dutch cleantech scale-up, has developed a technology platform for nanoporous silicon that can significantly boost the performance of next-generation lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs). E-magy’s low-cost process manufactures structured silicon particles with nano-scale pores that do not swell and break. As a result, batteries enjoy 40% higher... Read more →

Hydrogen as a zero-carbon energy carrier has the potential to transform fundamentally the global energy landscape—but the production must benefit the environment, according to experts at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Rachel Meidl, the fellow in energy and environment at the institute’s Center for Energy Studies, and Emily... Read more →

Rice University scientists are designing arrays of aligned single-wall carbon nanotubes to channel mid-infrared radiation—i.e., heat—and greatly raise the efficiency of solar energy systems. Gururaj Naik and Junichiro Kono of Rice’s Brown School of Engineering introduced their technology in a paper in ACS Photonics. A Rice University simulation shows an... Read more →

An international team of researchers led by a group from the University of Manchester in the UK has used a biological technique which won the 2017 Nobel Chemistry Prize to reveal 3D atomic-scale chemistry in metal nanoparticles used as catalysts. It is the first time this technique has been for... Read more →

Saudi Arabia-based SABIC, a global leader in diversified chemicals, has taken a majority stake in Black Diamond Structures (BDS), a nanotechnology company established in 2014. BDS produces and commercializes MOLECULAR REBAR, a proprietary technology of modified carbon nanotubes that offers potential for enhancing the performance of energy storage applications using... Read more →

The Rice University lab of chemist James Tour has shown that thin nanotube films effectively stop dendrites that grow naturally from unprotected lithium metal anodes in batteries. A paper on their work is published in the journal Advanced Materials. Here, it is shown that lithiated multiwall carbon nanotubes (Li‐MWCNTs) act... Read more →

Volkswagen and Stanford University have developed in partnership a new catalyst production process to reduce the comparatively high cost of automotive fuel cell technology. One of the biggest cost drivers for fuel cells is the use of the precious metal platinum as a catalyst to operate the fuel cell. The... Read more →

A Dalhousie University-led team has developed a longer-lasting, higher-efficiency platinum catalyst. The new catalyst combines gold and platinum to form what’s known as a single-atom catalyst, resulting in nearly 100-fold increases in efficiency over market platinum catalysts, says Peng Zhang, the Dalhousie professor who led this research. A paper on... Read more →

A team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), with colleagues at Tsinghua University and Brown University, have developed a means to regain the strain-hardening ability of high-strength metals by incorporating of extrinsic nanofillers at grain boundaries. A paper on their work is published in the ACS journal NANO Letters. Grain... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory announced the availability of a new manufacturing technology that simplifies the manufacture of nanomaterials in high volumes. Known as Flame Spray Pyrolysis (FSP), the technology offers significant benefits over traditional methods used to manufacture the particle-based substances that are critical to... Read more →

The University of Bristol is leading a US$1.4-million (£947,336) project—NanoComposites for Active Gas Encapsulation (nanoCAGE)—which will deliver smart composite materials to address the problem of safe and efficient hydrogen storage. A low-density gas, hydrogen is challenging to store on-board a vehicle. Nanoporous materials (materials containing holes only a few nanometers... Read more →

Stuart Licht, a chemistry professor at the George Washington University, and his team of researchers are among the finalists announced today in the $20-million Carbon XPRIZE competition. The team’s technological process C2CNT—Carbon dioxide to Carbon NanoTubes (earlier post)—is one of ten finalists advancing to the final round in the $20M... Read more →

Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a new approach for creating new catalysts to aid in clean energy conversion and storage. The design method, reported in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS) also has the potential to impact the discovery of new optical and... Read more →

Startup Mattershift says it has achieved a breakthrough in making carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes at large scale. The startup is developing the technology’s ability to combine and separate individual molecules to make gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel using CO2 removed from the air. In an open-access paper in Science Advances,... Read more →

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, with colleagues at Stanford have developed a general approach for the production of inexpensive, efficient and durable catalysts for PEM fuel cells: 1D porous nitrogen-doped graphitic carbon fibers embedded with active oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalyst components (M/MOx, i.e., metal or metal oxide... Read more →

MIT researchers have discovered a way to increase the efficiency of thermoelectric materials threefold by using “topological” materials, which have unique electronic properties. While past work has suggested that topological materials may serve as efficient thermoelectric systems, there has been little understanding as to how electrons in such topological materials... Read more →

A low-cost, nanostructured composite material developed by researchers at UC Santa Cruz has shown performance comparable to Pt/C as a catalyst for the electrochemical splitting of water to produce hydrogen. An efficient, low-cost catalyst is essential for realizing the promise of hydrogen as a clean, environmentally friendly fuel. Researchers led... Read more →

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, with colleagues at Purdue and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), have plated a one nanometer thick coating of platinum on a core of cobalt to create a cost-effective and highly efficient fuel cell catalyst. A paper on their work was published last year in the... Read more →

Nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes or modified graphene nanoribbons may be suitable replacements for platinum for fast oxygen reduction, the key reaction in fuel cells that transform chemical energy into electricity, according to Rice University researchers. The findings are from computer simulations by Rice scientists who set out to see how carbon... Read more →

A team led by researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and the University of California, Merced has developed an efficient molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) catalyst for driving the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). In a study published in the journal Advanced Materials, the team reports that metastable and temperature-sensitive chemically exfoliated MoS2 (ce-MoS2)... Read more →

A team led by researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has developed a new way to produce solar fuels by using completely synthetic bionano machinery to harvest light without the need for a living cell. The researchers’ device, reported in the journal ACS Nano as a... Read more →

Researchers at the University of Central Florida, with colleagues at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Tsinghua University, developed a new hybrid nanomaterial—a nonmetal plasmonic [email protected] heterostructure—for highly efficient photocatalytic H2 generation from water. As reported in an open access paper in the RSC journal Energy & Environmental Science, the... Read more →

Researchers at Rice University and their colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have learned to manipulate two-dimensional materials to design in defects that enhance the materials’ properties. Combining theory and experimentation, they showed it’s possible to give 2D materials specific defects—especially atomic-scale seams called grain boundaries. These boundaries may... Read more →

A group of Aalto University (Finland) researchers led by professors Tanja Kallio and Kari Laasonen has developed a manufacturing method for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysts that use only one-hundredth of the amount of platinum generally used in commercial products. They achieved pseudo atomic-scale dispersion of Pt—i.e. individual atoms or... Read more →

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a simple technique for producing oxide nanowires directly from bulk materials under ambient conditions without the use of catalysts or any external stimuli. The process could significantly lower the cost of producing the one-dimensional (1D) nanostructures, enabling a broad range of uses in lightweight... Read more →

Scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a one-pot synthesis process using diamondoids—the smallest possible bits of diamond—to assemble atoms into hybrid metal–organic chalcogenide nanowires with solid inorganic cores having three-atom cross-sections, representing the smallest possible nanowires. By grabbing various types of... Read more →

An international team led by researchers at UCLA and Caltech has demonstrated that altering the form of platinum nanoscale wires from a smooth surface to a jagged one can significantly reduce the amount of precious metal required as a catalyst for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells and... Read more →

A team from MIT and Saab AB has found a way to bond composite layers in such a way that the resulting material is substantially stronger and more resistant to damage than other advanced composites. Their results are published this week in the journal Composites Science and Technology. The team... Read more →

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have shown that 0.8-nm-diameter carbon nanotube porins, which promote the formation of one-dimensional water wires, can support proton transport rates exceeding those of bulk water by an order of magnitude. The transport rates in these nanotube pores also exceed those of biological channels and... Read more →

A finely tuned carbon nanotube thin film has the potential to act as a thermoelectric power generator that captures and uses waste heat, according to researchers at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The research could help guide the manufacture of thermoelectric devices based on either single-walled carbon... Read more →

An improved titanium alloy—stronger than any commercial titanium alloy currently on the market—gets its strength from the novel way atoms are arranged to form a special nanostructure. For the first time, a team led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have been able to see this alignment and... Read more →

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a colleague from Drexel University, have combined advanced in-situ microscopy and theoretical calculations to uncover important clues to the elastic properties of an MXene material—a promising next-generation energy storage material for supercapacitors and batteries—(earlier post), specifically a 2D titanium carbide (Ti3C2Tx). MXene material—which... Read more →

Researchers in S. Korea have developed a simple synthetic method for producing carbon-based hybrid cellular nanosheets that exhibit strong electrochemical performance for many key aspects of high-performance lithium-ion battery anodes. The nanosheets consist of close-packed cubic cavity cells partitioned by carbon walls, resembling plant leaf tissue. Loading the carbon cellular... Read more →

Researchers at Rice have demonstrated an efficient new way to use solar energy for water splitting. The technology, described in a paper in the ACS journal Nano Letters, relies on a novel plasmonic photoelectrode architecture of light-activated gold nanoparticles that harvest sunlight to drive photocatalytic reactions by efficient, non-radiative plasmon... Read more →

Argonne scientists have used the Mira supercomputer to identify and to improve a new mechanism for eliminating friction, which fed into the development of a hybrid material that exhibited superlubricity—a state in which friction essentially disappears—at the macroscale—i.e., at engineering scale—for the first time. A paper on their work was... Read more →

One of the main modern antiwear lubricant additives is zinc dialkyldithiophosphate (ZDDP)—widely used in automotive lubricants—which forms crucial antiwear tribofilms at sliding interfaces. However, despite its importance in prolonging machinery life and reducing energy use, the mechanisms governing its tribofilm growth are not well-understood. This limits the development of replacements... Read more →

Lintec of America has licensed novel fabrication methods for carbon nanotube (CNT) macrostructures, including sheets, yarns and ribbons, developed at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) by Dr. Ray Baughman, the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry, and his colleagues at the University’s Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute,... Read more →

Scientists at Rice University and the University of Minnesota have identified, through a large-scale, multi-step computational screening process, promising zeolite structures for two energy-related applications: the purification of ​ethanol from fermentation broths and the hydroisomerization of alkanes with 18–30 carbon atoms encountered in petroleum refining. The results, presented in a... Read more →

The mesh with BiVO4 nanowire photoanode for water oxidation and Rh-SrTiO3 nanowire photocathode for water reduction produces hydrogen gas without an electron mediator. Credit: ACS, Liu et al. Click to enlarge. Researchers from UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore have developed a new technology for... Read more →

Researchers from the University of Maryland have used molecular dynamics simulation to demonstrate graphene nano-cages which will open and close in response to an electric charge using a technique they call hydrogenation-assisted graphene origami (HAGO). The cages can stably store hydrogen molecules at a density of 9.7 wt % hydrogen—significantly... Read more →

The European Union-funded PowerDriver project—a two-year, €3-million (US$4-million) research project initiated in February 2012 to turn exhaust gas waste heat into electricity using thermoelectric generator (TGEN) technology—has completed simulation work on on a potential automotive application. Results suggest TGEN output of 300W and equivalent fuel saving over the NEDC drive... Read more →

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Fudan University, have discovered that key surface properties of complex oxide films are unaffected by reduced levels of oxygen during fabrication—an unanticipated finding with possible implications for the design of functional complex oxides. The... Read more →

Hydrogen bubbles as they appear in a photoelectrochemical cell. © LPI / EPFL. Click to enlarge. Researchers from EPFL in Switzerland and Technion-Israel Institue of Technology have developed nanoparticle-based α-Fe2O3 (hematite) electrodes that achieve the highest photocurrent of any metal oxide photoanode for photoelectrochemical water-splitting under 100 mW cm−2 air mass, 1.5... Read more →

In the electrochemical reduction of water to molecular hydrogen, the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is facilitated by noble metal catalysts such as platinum (Pt), which generate large cathodic current densities for this reaction at low overpotentials. A research team led by Raymond Schaak, a professor of chemistry at Penn State... Read more →

The new MOF contains triangular channels running through the material. The walls of these channels trap the lower-octane components while allowing the higher-octane molecules to pass through, potentially providing a more efficient and cost effective way to refine high-octane gasoline. Credit: Science/AAAS. Click to enlarge. An international team of researchers... Read more →