Tag Archives: US Dept. of Energy

Abracadabra! A new material!

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A Nov. 3, 2011 news release from the US Dept. of Energy (DOE) announced the Materials Project,

Researchers from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) jointly launched today a groundbreaking new online tool called the Materials Project, which operates like a “Google” of material properties, enabling scientists and engineers from universities, national laboratories and private industry to accelerate the development of new materials, including critical materials.

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Discovering new materials and strengthening the properties of existing materials are key to improving just about everything humans use – from buildings and highways to modern necessities. For example, advances in a group of materials called “critical materials” are more important to America’s competitiveness than ever before – particularly in the clean energy field.  Cell phones, wind turbines, solar panels and a variety of military technologies depend on these roughly fourteen elements (including nine “rare earth” elements).  With about 90 percent coming from China, there are growing concerns about potential supply shortages and disruptions.

The Dec. 20, 2011 news item on Nanowerk provides more detail,

The project is a direct outgrowth of MIT’s Materials Genome Project, initiated in 2006 by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons (1953) Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. The idea, he says, is that the site “would become the Google of material properties,” making available data previously scattered in many different places, most of them not even searchable.

For example, it used to require months of work — consulting tables of data, performing calculations and carrying out precise lab tests — to create a single phase diagram showing when compounds incorporating several different elements would be solid, liquid or gas. Now, such a diagram can be generated in a matter of minutes, Ceder says.

The new tool could revolutionize product development in fields from energy to electronics to biochemistry, its developers say, much as search engines have transformed the ability to search for arcane bits of knowledge.

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Already, more than 500 researchers from universities, research labs and companies have used the new system to seek new materials for lithium-ion batteries, photovoltaic cells and new lightweight alloys for use in cars, trucks and airplanes. The Materials Project is available for use by anyone, although users must register (free of charge) in order to spend more than a few minutes, or to use the most advanced features.

Interestingly, the Materials Project could have an impact on education too,

The tools could also make a big difference in education, Ceder says: When professors set up experiments to help students learn specific principles, “it used to be that we had to pick easy examples” with known outcomes, he says. Now, it’s possible to set much more challenging exercises.

I wasn’t expecting to find a quote from a Canadian academic but here goes,

Mark Obrovac, an associate professor of chemistry and physics at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, says, “The Materials Project has made complex computational techniques available to materials researchers at a click of a mouse. This is a major innovation in materials science, enabling researchers to rapidly predict the structure and properties of materials before they make them, and even of materials that cannot be made. This can significantly accelerate materials development in many important areas, including advanced batteries, microelectronics and telecommunications.”

You can find the Materials Project here.

Smart glass, curling electrodes and a business opportunity

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Boris Lamontagne (boris.lamontagne@nrc.ca) at Canada’s National Research Council is looking for a business partner or two to commercialize his smart glass which features ‘micro blinds’. Here’s a demonstration complete with illustrations of the technology,

I found more technical details about the ‘micro blinds’ (from the abstract of a paper, The next generation of switchable glass : the Micro-Blinds, by Boris Lamontagne, Pedro Barrios and Christophe Py at Glassfiles.com (you will need to register at the website to view the full text of the paper),

The micro-blinds are composed of invisible and electrostatically activated curling electrodes of 100 micrometers size. They can be deposited on flat glass by magnetron sputtering like regular low-E coatings, and then patterned by laser. They possess several advantages such as switching speed, UV durability, customized appearance and transmission, and do not employ costly ITO, relative to the current smart windows technologies: electrochromic, suspended particles and liquid crystals.

Let’s get this smart glass commercialized. As regular readers know, I’m very interested in smart glass/windows and I would very much like to see the technology enter the marketplace. My most recent posting on smart windows was Sept. 7, 2011 about some research done by the  US Dept. of Energy.

ETA Sept. 22, 2011: There’s a Sept. 22, 2011 news item about Lamontagne’s smart glass on Nanowerk.

The latest in smart windows

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At last there’s a new development in smart windows giving me fresh hope that I will see these in my lifetime. From the Sept. 6, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have unveiled a semiconductor nanocrystal coating material capable of controlling heat from the sun while remaining transparent (“Dynamically Modulating the Surface Plasmon Resonance of Doped Semiconductor Nanocrystals”). Based on electrochromic materials, which use a jolt of electric charge to tint a clear window, this breakthrough technology is the first to selectively control the amount of near infrared radiation. This radiation, which leads to heating, passes through the film without affecting its visible transmittance. Such a dynamic system could add a critical energy-saving dimension to “smart window” coatings.

“To have a transparent electrochromic material that can change its transmittance in the infrared portion of sunlight is completely unprecedented,” says Delia Milliron, director of the Inorganic Nanostructures Facility with Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, who led this research.

These kinds of coatings offer substantive energy savings. A lot of people don’t realize that buildings account for approximately 40% of the carbon emissions in the US. A smart window could theoretically lower the use of air conditioning and lighting by as much as 49% and 51% respectively according to the authors of the news item. I have seen similarly high numbers elsewhere so I am inclined to believe them.

Here’s what I think is the nifty part,

“Traditional electrochromic windows cannot selectively control the amount of visible and near infrared light that transmits through the film. When operated, these windows can either block both regions of light or let them in simultaneously,” says Guillermo Garcia, a graduate student researcher at the Foundry. “This work represents a stepping stone to the ideal smart window, which would be able to selectively choose which region of sunlight is needed to optimize the temperature inside a building.”

And then there’s the robot,

“Our ability to leverage plasmons in doped semiconductors with a very sensitive switching response in the near-infrared region also brings to mind applications in telecommunications,” Milliron adds. “We’ve also brought this synthesis into WANDA, our nanocrystal robot, which means we will be able to provide materials for a wide variety of user projects. “

I don’t see anything which indicates when this might be commercially available.

This latest development reminded me of Switch Materials, the Canadian smart window company that’s located in the Vancouver region. I last wrote about them in my May 14, 2010 posting and thought I’d check them out again. They have a new look on their website and a number of headings for different categories of purchasers such as architects, manufacturers, owners, etc. There’s also a list of the various media outlets that have featured the company. Strangely, there’s no mention of any customers and other than a very general description heavily weighted towards the advantages of the technology I was not able to find much detail about the technology. That’s also true of the news item but I expect more from a company website, especially a company offering an emerging technology. Finally, I was not able to discover how to purchase the product other than contacting a general phone number or sending a general inquiry to info@switchmaterials.com.

Is self-healing paint nanotech-enabled?; intellectual property in science fiction and in science; global nanotech regulation database

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Ariel Schwartz has a news item on Fast Company about Japanese cell phones and self-healing paint. It seems to me that this is likely nanotech-enabled technology and an example of how we are more and more able to exploit the properties of matter at the nano scale. But, I couldn’t find any information to confirm my suspicion. More about the paint from the news item,

Nissan recently licensed its Scratch Shield paint, which is scratch resistant and even repairs fine scratches, to Japanese cell phone company NTT DoCoMo. The paint has been used on select Nissan and Infiniti cars worldwide since 1995, but this is the first time it will be used outside of the vehicle market. Unlike the vehicle paint, cell-phone scratch-proof paint will only be available in Japan for now. But considering the wear and tear that most cell phones see, demand for the product will almost certainly expand to a worldwide market.

I did check out the Nissan website which offers a few more pictures than the news item does but not much more information.

I occasionally mention intellectual property (IP) as the current turmoil over copyrights, patents, and trademarks have an impact on writing. It’s with some dismay that I found an item on Techdirt about a science fiction movie that’s being sued for patent infringement. Yes, a fictional device has been patented. Given that lots of items that we take for granted, cell phones/mobiles for example, are based on devices found in fiction first, this lawsuit does not bode well. Coincidentally (on the same day), I saw another item onTechdirt, Yet Another Nobel Prize Winner Says That Intellectual Property Law Is Harming Science. From the item,

For science to continue to flourish, it is necessary that the knowledge it generates be made freely and widely available. IP rights have the tendency to stifle access to knowledge and the free exchange of ideas that is essential to science. So, far from stimulating innovation and the dissemination of the benefits of science, IP all too often hampers scientific progress and restricts access to its products.

If this issue interests you, the item on Techdirt offers more links. Btw, the scientist speaking out is Sir John Sulston (a prize-winning biologist).

Thoughts of intellectual property led me to thoughts about lawyers, which is why the news item on Nanowerk about a global nanotechnology regulation database caught my eye.  From the news item,

A global database of government documents on nanotechnology is being launched by three law professors at Arizona State University who, with their colleagues in Australia and Belgium, have corralled and organized a massive number of regulatory documents dealing with the rapidly advancing technology. The Nanotech Regulatory Document Archive is a free resource built and maintained by the Center for the Study of Law, Science, & Technology at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Over the past year, Gary Marchant, the center’s executive director, and center Faculty Fellows Douglas Sylvester and Kenneth Abbott, developed the database as part of a multiyear grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genomic Science Program.

I am intrigued to see that the project is being funded though a sort of genome programme being run by the US Dept. of Energy. I find this to be an unusual conflation but I suspect that’s largely due to my ignorance. I’ve certainly noticed the talk about bio-nano so a genome project being run by an energy department is not entirely out of the question but it hints at the idea that the gap between living and nonliving is being bridged. More about that when I’ve had time to think about it.

Idle thought: I wonder how long this free tool will remain free.

Plenty of Room at the Bottom’s 50th anniversary; new advance in nanoassembly; satirizing the copyright wars; China’s social media map

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There’s plenty of room at the bottom, Richard Feynman’s December 29, 1959 talk for the American Physical Society is considered to be the starting point or origin for nanotechnology and this December marks its 50th anniversary. Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina NanoCenter, has an interesting commentary about it (on Nanowerk) and he poses the question, would nanotechnology have existed without Richard Feynman’s talk? Toumey answers yes. You can read the commentary here.

In contrast to Toumey’s speculations, there’s  Colin Milburn (professor at University of California, Davis) who in his essay, Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction as Science, suggests that nanotechnology originated in science fiction. You can read more about Milburn, find the citations for the essay I’ve mentioned, and/or download three of his other essays from here.

Ting Xu and her colleagues at the US Dept. of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new technique for self-assembling nanoparticles. From the news item on Physorg.com,

“Bring together the right basic components – nanoparticles, polymers and small molecules – stimulate the mix with a combination of heat, light or some other factors, and these components will assemble into sophisticated structures or patterns,” says Xu. “It is not dissimilar from how nature does it.”

More details are available here.

TechDirt featured a clip from This hour has 22 minutes, a satirical Canadian comedy tv programme, which pokes fun at the scaremongering which features mightily in discussions about copyright. You can find the clip here on YouTube.

I’ve been meaning to mention this tiny item from Fast Company (by Noah Robischon) about China’s social media. From the news bit,

The major players in the U.S. social media world can be counted on one hand: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn. Not so in China, where the country’s 300 million online users have a panoply of popular social networks to choose from–and Facebook doesn’t even crack the top 10.

Go here to see the infographic illustrating China’s social media landscape.

Happy weekend!