Polymer nanocomposites mix particles billionths of a meter (nanometers, nm) in diameter with polymers, which are long molecular chains.
Barely wider than a strand of human DNA, magnetic nanoparticles—such as those made from iron and platinum atoms—are promising materials for next-generation recording and storage devices like hard drives.
Samsung Electronics has exclusively licensed optically clear superhydrophobic film technology from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to improve the performance of glass displays on smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices.
The US Department of Energy announced today that it will invest $16 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers.
When physicists Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller discovered the first high-temperature superconductors in 1986, it didn’t take much imagination to envision the potential technological benefits of harnessing such materials.
Hard carbon materials recycled from tires continue to show great promise as anodes in sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage, according to an Oak Ridge National Laboratory study led by Yunchao Li.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have received six R&D 100 Awards, increasing the lab’s total to 193 since the award’s inception in 1963.
Steady progress in the development of advanced materials has led to modern civilization’s foundational technologies—better batteries, resilient building materials and atom-scale semiconductors.
Some of the 300 million tires discarded each year in the United States alone could be used in supercapacitors for vehicles and the electric grid using a technology developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Drexel University.
In the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, the state of the art of materials science defined technology’s zenith and accelerated economies.