Tag Archives: Xi’an Jiaotong University

Supranano (below 10 nanometers) engineering enhances strength and ductility of structural materials

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‘Supranano’ means the work is being conducted at measurements below 10 nanometres. A January 24, 2025 news item announces research from the City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK),

Building on their work on the first-ever supranano magnesium alloy, a research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has demonstrated how supranano engineering can lead to higher strength and higher ductility in bulk structural materials.

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A January 24, 2025 City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) press release by Michael Gibb, which originated the news item, delves further into the research,

The ultimate problem that the CityUHK-led team has set out to solve is related to the strength and ductility for materials made from metals, for example, steel or titanium, said Professor Lu Jian, Dean of CityUHK’s College of Engineering.

“If we want to create stronger and more ductile materials, we need to guard against producing alloys that inevitably show decreased strain-hardening capacity over time,” Professor Lu said.

The unique approach adopted by Professor Lu’s team is successfully controlling the arrangement and design of the grain interiors and boundaries of a fine-grained alloy at the supranano level, i.e. below 10 nanometers.

“We have previously worked on magnesium alloys but for this project, we used a multicomponent blend of metals for synthesis,” Professor Lu explained, adding the three collaborative research groups under his team include his former PhD students and postdocs conducting research on supra-nano-dual-phase structures. They are now professors and research leaders at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

They discovered that the supranano ordering helped to promote a continuously increased flow stress until the fracture of the alloy at a remarkable 10% strain with an equally impressive 2.6-gigapascal (GPa) tensile stress.

“The yield strength of nanostructured fine-grained alloys is usually less than 1.5 to 2 GPa,” he said.

Essentially, Professor Lu continues, the CityUHK-led team found that supranano orderings have a stronger pinning effect for dislocations and stacking faults (SFs). It makes the motion of dislocations and SFs slow, which increases the possibility of their interaction and entanglement with other moveable dislocations, and which promotes multiplication and accumulation of these defects upon loading.

“The supranano orderings with precipitates are uniformly distributed in the grain interior, and thus, the distribution of the generated defects is also uniform, which alleviates strain localisation, leading to mutually complementary strengthening and ductilisation and facilitating a high strain-hardening rate and large elongation,” Professor Lu said.

Fine-tuning these supranano engineering techniques will further enhance the strength and ductility of different materials, leading to a spectrum of applications in aerospace, automobile, 3C (computer, communication and consumer electronics) industries, and in construction using super-strong alloys.

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Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Ductilization of 2.6-GPa alloys via short-range ordered interfaces and supranano precipitates by Yong-Qiang Yan, Wen-Hao Cha, Sida Liu, Yan Ma, Jun-Hua Luan, Ziyuan Rao, Chang Liu, Zhi-Wei Shan, Jian Lu, and Ge Wu. Science 23 Jan 2025 Vol 387, Issue 6732 pp. 401-406 DOI: 10.1126/science.adr4917

This paper is behind a paywall.

Ouchies no more! Not from bandages, anyway.

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An adhesive that US and Chinese scientists have developed shows great promise not just for bandages but wearable robotics too. From a December 14, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Xi’an Jiaotong University in China have developed a new type of adhesive that can strongly adhere wet materials — such as hydrogel and living tissue — and be easily detached with a specific frequency of light.

The adhesives could be used to attach and painlessly detach wound dressings, transdermal drug delivery devices, and wearable robotics.

A December 18, 2018 SEAS news release by Leah Burrows (also on EurekAlert but published Dec. 14, 2018), which originated the news item, delves further,

“Strong adhesion usually requires covalent bonds, physical interactions, or a combination of both,” said Yang Gao, first author of the paper and researcher at Xi’an Jiaotong University. “Adhesion through covalent bonds is hard to remove and adhesion through physical interactions usually requires solvents, which can be time-consuming and environmentally harmful. Our method of using light to trigger detachment is non-invasive and painless.”

The adhesive uses an aqueous solution of polymer chains spread between two, non-sticky materials — like jam between two slices of bread. On their own, the two materials adhere poorly together but the polymer chains act as a molecular suture, stitching the two materials together by forming a network with the two preexisting polymer networks. This process is known as topological entanglement.

When exposed to ultra-violet light, the network of stitches dissolves, separating the two materials.

The researchers, led by Zhigang Suo, the Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechanics and Materials at SEAS, tested adhesion and detachment on a range of materials, sticking together hydrogels; hydrogels and organic tissue; elastomers; hydrogels and elastomers; and hydrogels and inorganic solids.

“Our strategy works across a range of materials and may enable broad applications,” said Kangling Wu, co-lead author and researcher at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.
While the researchers focused on using UV light to trigger detachment, their work suggests the possibility that the stitching polymer could detach with near-infrared light, a feature which could be applied to a range of new medical procedures.

“In nature, wet materials don’t like to adhere together,” said Suo. “We have discovered a general approach to overcome this challenge. Our molecular sutures can strongly adhere wet materials together. Furthermore, the strong adhesion can be made permanent, transient, or detachable on demand, in response to a cue. So, as we see it, nature is full of loopholes, waiting to be stitched.”

Here’s a link to and  a citation for the paper,

Photodetachable Adhesion by Yang Gao, Kangling Wu, Zhigang Suo. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201806948 First published: 14 December 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

4D printing, what is that?

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According to an April 12, 2017 news item on ScienceDaily, shapeshifting in response to environmental stimuli is the fourth dimension (I have a link to a posting about 4D printing with another fourth dimension),

A team of researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and two other institutions has developed a new 3-D printing method to create objects that can permanently transform into a range of different shapes in response to heat.

The team, which included researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, created the objects by printing layers of shape memory polymers with each layer designed to respond differently when exposed to heat.

“This new approach significantly simplifies and increases the potential of 4-D printing by incorporating the mechanical programming post-processing step directly into the 3-D printing process,” said Jerry Qi, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “This allows high-resolution 3-D printed components to be designed by computer simulation, 3-D printed, and then directly and rapidly transformed into new permanent configurations by simply heating.”

The research was reported April 12 [2017] in the journal Science Advances, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The work is funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Singapore National Research Foundation through the SUTD DManD Centre.

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An April 12, 2017 Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) press release on EurekAlert provides more detail,

4D printing is an emerging technology that allows a 3D-printed component to transform its structure by exposing it to heat, light, humidity, or other environmental stimuli. This technology extends the shape creation process beyond 3D printing, resulting in additional design flexibility that can lead to new types of products which can adjust its functionality in response to the environment, in a pre-programmed manner. However, 4D printing generally involves complex and time-consuming post-processing steps to mechanically programme the component. Furthermore, the materials are often limited to soft polymers, which limit their applicability in structural scenarios.

A group of researchers from the SUTD, Georgia Institute of Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University and Zhejiang University has introduced an approach that significantly simplifies and increases the potential of 4D printing by incorporating the mechanical programming post-processing step directly into the 3D printing process. This allows high-resolution 3D-printed components to be designed by computer simulation, 3D printed, and then directly and rapidly transformed into new permanent configurations by using heat. This approach can help save printing time and materials used by up to 90%, while completely eliminating the time-consuming mechanical programming process from the design and manufacturing workflow.

“Our approach involves printing composite materials where at room temperature one material is soft but can be programmed to contain internal stress, and the other material is stiff,” said Dr. Zhen Ding of SUTD. “We use computational simulations to design composite components where the stiff material has a shape and size that prevents the release of the programmed internal stress from the soft material after 3D printing. Upon heating, the stiff material softens and allows the soft material to release its stress. This results in a change – often dramatic – in the product shape.” This new shape is fixed when the product is cooled, with good mechanical stiffness. The research demonstrated many interesting shape changing parts, including a lattice that can expand by almost 8 times when heated.

This new shape becomes permanent and the composite material will not return to its original 3D-printed shape, upon further heating or cooling. “This is because of the shape memory effect,” said Prof. H. Jerry Qi of Georgia Tech. “In the two-material composite design, the stiff material exhibits shape memory, which helps lock the transformed shape into a permanent one. Additionally, the printed structure also exhibits the shape memory effect, i.e. it can then be programmed into further arbitrary shapes that can always be recovered to its new permanent shape, but not its 3D-printed shape.”

Said SUTD’s Prof. Martin Dunn, “The key advance of this work, is a 4D printing method that is dramatically simplified and allows the creation of high-resolution complex 3D reprogrammable products; it promises to enable myriad applications across biomedical devices, 3D electronics, and consumer products. It even opens the door to a new paradigm in product design, where components are designed from the onset to inhabit multiple configurations during service.”

Here’s a video,


Uploaded on Apr 17, 2017

A research team led by the Singapore University of Technology and Design’s (SUTD) Associate Provost of Research, Professor Martin Dunn, has come up with a new and simplified 4D printing method that uses a 3D printer to rapidly create 3D objects, which can permanently transform into a range of different shapes in response to heat.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Direct 4D printing via active composite materials by Zhen Ding, Chao Yuan, Xirui Peng, Tiejun Wang, H. Jerry Qi, and Martin L. Dunn. Science Advances  12 Apr 2017: Vol. 3, no. 4, e1602890 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1602890

This paper is open access.

Here is a link to a post about another 4th dimension, time,

4D printing: a hydrogel orchid (Jan. 28, 2016)

Crowd computing for improved nanotechnology-enabled water filtration

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This research is the product of a China/Israel/Switzerland collaboration on water filtration with involvement from the UK and Australia. Here’s some general information about the importance of water and about the collaboration in a July 5, 2015 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

Nearly 800 million people worldwide don’t have access to safe drinking water, and some 2.5 billion people live in precariously unsanitary conditions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Together, unsafe drinking water and the inadequate supply of water for hygiene purposes contribute to almost 90% of all deaths from diarrheal diseases — and effective water sanitation interventions are still challenging scientists and engineers.

A new study published in Nature Nanotechnology (“Water transport inside carbon nanotubes mediated by phonon-induced oscillating friction”) proposes a novel nanotechnology-based strategy to improve water filtration. The research project involves the minute vibrations of carbon nanotubes called “phonons,” which greatly enhance the diffusion of water through sanitation filters. The project was the joint effort of a Tsinghua University-Tel Aviv University research team and was led by Prof. Quanshui Zheng of the Tsinghua Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics and Prof. Michael Urbakh of the TAU School of Chemistry, both of the TAU-Tsinghua XIN Center, in collaboration with Prof. Francois Grey of the University of Geneva.

A July 5, 2015 American Friends of Tel Aviv University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more details about the work,

“We’ve discovered that very small vibrations help materials, whether wet or dry, slide more smoothly past each other,” said Prof. Urbakh. “Through phonon oscillations — vibrations of water-carrying nanotubes — water transport can be enhanced, and sanitation and desalination improved. Water filtration systems require a lot of energy due to friction at the nano-level. With these oscillations, however, we witnessed three times the efficiency of water transport, and, of course, a great deal of energy saved.”

The research team managed to demonstrate how, under the right conditions, such vibrations produce a 300% improvement in the rate of water diffusion by using computers to simulate the flow of water molecules flowing through nanotubes. The results have important implications for desalination processes and energy conservation, e.g. improving the energy efficiency for desalination using reverse osmosis membranes with pores at the nanoscale level, or energy conservation, e.g. membranes with boron nitride nanotubes.

Crowdsourcing the solution

The project, initiated by IBM’s World Community Grid, was an experiment in crowdsourced computing — carried out by over 150,000 volunteers who contributed their own computing power to the research.

“Our project won the privilege of using IBM’s world community grid, an open platform of users from all around the world, to run our program and obtain precise results,” said Prof. Urbakh. “This was the first project of this kind in Israel, and we could never have managed with just four students in the lab. We would have required the equivalent of nearly 40,000 years of processing power on a single computer. Instead we had the benefit of some 150,000 computing volunteers from all around the world, who downloaded and ran the project on their laptops and desktop computers.

“Crowdsourced computing is playing an increasingly major role in scientific breakthroughs,” Prof. Urbakh continued. “As our research shows, the range of questions that can benefit from public participation is growing all the time.”

The computer simulations were designed by Ming Ma, who graduated from Tsinghua University and is doing his postdoctoral research in Prof. Urbakh’s group at TAU. Ming catalyzed the international collaboration. “The students from Tsinghua are remarkable. The project represents the very positive cooperation between the two universities, which is taking place at XIN and because of XIN,” said Prof. Urbakh.

Other partners in this international project include researchers at the London Centre for Nanotechnology of University College London; the University of Geneva; the University of Sydney and Monash University in Australia; and the Xi’an Jiaotong University in China. The researchers are currently in discussions with companies interested in harnessing the oscillation knowhow for various commercial projects.

 

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Water transport inside carbon nanotubes mediated by phonon-induced oscillating friction by Ming Ma, François Grey, Luming Shen, Michael Urbakh, Shuai Wu,    Jefferson Zhe Liu, Yilun Liu, & Quanshui Zheng. Nature Nanotechnology (2015) doi:10.1038/nnano.2015.134 Published online 06 July 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.

Final comment, I find it surprising that they used labour and computing power from 150,000 volunteers and didn’t offer open access to the paper. Perhaps the volunteers got their own copy? I certainly hope so.

Call for papers (IEEE [Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers] 10th annual NEMS conference in 2015

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The deadline for submissions is Nov. 15, 2014 and here’s more from the notice on the IEEE [Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website for the IEEE-NEMS [nano/micro engineered and moecular systems] 2015,

The 10th Annual IEEE International Conference on Nano/ Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems (IEEE-NEMS 2015)
Xi’an, China
April 7-11, 2015
http://www.ieee-nems.org/2015/

The IEEE International Conference on Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems (IEEE-NEMS) is a series of successful conferences that began in Zhuhai, China in 2006, and has been a premier IEEE annual conference series held mostly in Asia which focuses on MEMS, nanotechnology, and molecular technology. Prior conferences were held in Waikiki Beach (USA, 2014), Suzhou (China, 2013), Kyoto (Japan, 2012), Kaohsiung (Taiwan, 2011), Xiamen (China, 2010), Shenzhen (China, 2009), Hainan Island (China, 2008), Bangkok (Thailand, 2007), and Zhuhai (China, 2006). The conference typically has ~350 attendees with participants from more than 20 countries and regions world-wide.

In 2015, the conference will be held in Xi’an, one of the great ancient capitals of China. Xi’an has more than 3,100 years of history, and was known as Chang’an before the Ming dynasty. Xi’an is the starting point of the Silk Road and home to the Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

We now invite contributions describing the latest scientific and technological research results in subjects including, but are not limited to:

  • Nanophotonics
  • Nanomaterials
  • Nanobiology, Nanomedicine, Nano-bio-informatics
  • Micro/Nano Fluidics, BioMEMS, and Lab-on-Chips
  • Molecular Sensors, Actuators, and Systems
  • Micro/Nano Sensors, Actuators, and Systems
  • Carbon Nanotube/Graphene/Diamond based Devices
  • Micro/Nano/Molecular Heat Transfer & Energy Conversion
  • Micro/Nano/Molecular Fabrication
  • Nanoscale Metrology
  • Micro/Nano Robotics, Assembly & Automation
  • Integration & Application of MEMS/NEMS
  • Flexible MEMS, Sensors and Printed Electronics
  • Commercialization of MEMS/NEMS/Nanotechnology
  • Nanotechnology Safety and Education

Important Dates:

Nov. 15, 2014 – Abstract/Full Paper Submission
Dec. 31, 2014 – Notification of Acceptance
Jan. 31, 2015 – Final Full Paper Submission

We hope to see you at Xi’an, China, in April 2015!

General Chair: Ning Xi, Michigan State University, USA
Program Chair: Guangyong Li, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Organizing Chair: Wen J. Li, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Local Arrangement Chair: Xiaodong Zhang, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China

The 2015 IEEE-NEMS webpage offers more general information about the conference,

The IEEE-NEMS is a key conference series sponsored by the IEEE Nanotechnology Council focusing on advanced research areas related to MEMS, nanotechnology, and molecular technology. … The conference typically has ~350 attendees with participants from more than 20 countries and regions world-wide.

Good luck!