We are facing accelerated global warming due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. A hydrogen-based economy is one potential approach toward maintaining our standard of living while lowering carbon dioxide emissions. Palladium is a unique material with a strong affinity to hydrogen owing to both its catalytic and hydrogen absorbing properties.
15 June 2011
Magic: “Influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.” Precious metals are alluring and magical because of their inactivity toward chemical reactions; they are extremely stable and hence are also termed “noble metals.” During the industrial revolution mankind realized that noble metals have the power to influence the course of chemical events – through catalysis. A catalyst is defined as a substance that facilitates a chemical transformation without itself being consumed in the process; this power has a mysterious, almost magic-wand character.
11 April 2011
While plastics have revolutionized industrial design due to their versatile processability, their relatively low strength has hampered their use in structural components. On the other hand, while metals are the basis for strong structural components, the geometries into which they can be processed are rather limited. Here we show that bulk metallic glasses, which have superior mechanical properties, can be blow molded like plastics.
23 February 2011
Are you on Facebook? Twitter, perhaps? Maybe LinkedIn? What about a social networking site dedicated to materials science? If you are not, you may be more alone than you think…
16 February 2010
Increasing attention on metamaterials has been paid due to their exciting physical behaviors and potential applications. While most of such artificial material structures developed so far are based on metallic resonant structures, Mie resonances of dielectric particles open a simpler and more versatile route for construction of isotropic metamaterials with higher operating frequencies.
13 January 2010
Phononic crystals have been proposed about two decades ago and some important characteristics such as acoustic band structure and negative refraction have stimulated fundamental and practical studies in acoustic materials and devices since then.
12 January 2010
In the last few years, a rapid development has been achieved in a subject area, so called optical transformation, which is based on the property of metric invariance in Maxwell's equations. Optical transformation, also known as transformation optics, allows metamaterials to be tailor-made according to practical needs.
12 January 2010
Neutron diffraction methods offer a direct measure of the elastic component of strain deep within crystalline materials through precise characterisation of the interplanar crystal lattice spacing. the unique non-destructive nature of this measurement technique is particularly beneficial in the context of engineering design and archaeological materials science, since it allows the evaluation of a variety of structural and deformational parameters inside real components without material removal, or at worst with minimal interference.....
14 August 2009
We describe recent computational and experimental studies on the corrosion properties of metallic coatings that can be tailored (tuned) to deliver up to three corrosion-inhibiting functions to an underlying substrate.
26 September 2008
Nanocontainers with a shell possessing controlled release properties can be used to fabricate a new family of active coatings that can respond quickly to changes in the coating environment or the coating's integrity.
26 September 2008