Collaborate Disseminate
There’s some nifty research from the University of Bayreuth, together with partners in China and the U.S., on creating supremely tough aluminosilicate glass that boasts an unusual structure. The image …read more Continue reading Supremely-tough Glass Performs Under Pressure
On a balmy September evening in 1998, Swissair flight 111 was in big trouble. A fire in the cockpit ceiling had at first blinded the pilots with smoke, leaving them to rely on instruments to divert the plane, en route from New York to Geneva, to an emergency landing at Halifax Airport in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. But the fire raging above and behind the pilots, intense enough to melt the aluminum of the flight deck, consumed wiring harness after wiring harness, cutting power to vital flight control systems. With no way to control the plane, the MD-11 …read more
Continue reading Kapton: Miracle Material with a Tragic History
Hackaday readers are well aware of the problems caused by materials left exposed to the environment over time, whether that be oxidized contact pads on circuit boards or plastics made brittle from long exposure to the sun’s UV rays.
Now consider the perils faced by materials on the International Space Station (ISS), launched beginning in 1998 and planned to be used until 2028. That’s a total of 30 years in an environment of unfiltered sunlight, extreme temperatures, micrometeoroids, and even problems caused by oxygen. What about the exposure faced by the newly launched Tesla Roadster, an entirely non-space hardened vehicle …read more
Continue reading Lost In Space: How Materials Degrade In Space
There are many obstacles in the way to turning carbon nanotubes into something useful. Materials engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now brought carbon nanotubes (CNTs) one step closer to becoming practically applicable for semiconductor electronics. In particular, the team managed to assemble arrays of carbon nanotube transistors that outperform their silicon-based predecessors.
One obstacle the researchers had to overcome were metallic impurities, which are present in arc-discharge-generated carbon nanotubes and practically short-circuit the materials semiconducting properties. To get rid of these impurities, the researchers developed a sorting mechanism based on a solution of polymers which wrap around the …read more
Continue reading Carbon Nanotube Transistors Are On The Passing Lane