Infrastructure and everyday materials

University of Missouri researchers have developed a novel 3D printing and laser process to manufacture multi-material, multi-layered sensors, circuit boards, and even textiles with electronic components. The researchers built a machine that has three different nozzles: one nozzle adds ink-like material, another uses a laser to carve shapes and materials, and a third nozzle adds functional materials to enhance the product’s capabilities. The manufacturing process starts by making a basic structure with a regular 3D printing filament.

Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have created a process to develop ultrahigh-strength aluminum alloys that are suitable for additive manufacturing. The researchers produced the aluminum alloys by using several transition metals, including cobalt, iron, nickel and titanium. "These intermetallics have crystal structures with low symmetry and are known to be brittle at room temperature," said Anyu Shang, one of the researchers involved in this study.

Imaging the hot turbulence of aircraft propulsion systems may now be possible with sturdy sheets of composite materials that twist light beams, according to researchers from the University of Michigan, the Air Force Research Laboratory, ARCTOS Technology Solutions (Beavercreek, OH), the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials in Campinas, Brazil, and the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil. The key is arranging nanomaterials that don't twist light on their own onto layers that turn light waves into either left- or right-handed spirals, known as circular polarizations.

Researchers from North Carolina State University; Stanford University; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; and the University of Geneva have, for the first time, demonstrated that a specific class of oxide membranes can confine, or "squeeze," infrared light. The thin-film membranes (which are 100-nanometer-thick) confine infrared light far better than bulk crystals, which are the established technology for infrared light confinement.

Researchers from Rice University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed an additive-free, water-based ink made of lignin and cellulose, the fundamental building blocks of wood. The ink can be used to produce architecturally intricate wood structures via a 3D printing technique known as direct ink writing. The researchers focused on optimizing the composition of the ink by adjusting the ratio of lignin, cellulose nanofibers, and nanocrystals while maintaining the natural lignin-cellulose balance.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Universitat de Girona in Spain, and Universidade do Porto in Portugal have shown that they can prevent cracks from spreading between layers in a composite material by depositing chemically grown forests of carbon nanotubes between the composite layers. The tiny, densely packed fibers grip and hold the layers together, like ultrastrong Velcro, preventing the layers from peeling or shearing apart.

Researchers from Penn State have created a metasurface that can be used to preprocess and transform images before they are captured by a camera, allowing a computer – and artificial intelligence – to process them with minimal power and data bandwidth. A metasurface is an optical element akin to a glass slide that uses tiny nanostructures placed at different angles to control light. This new metasurface has many potential applications, including for use in target tracking and surveillance to map how a car, for example, moves across a city.

Researchers from Harvard University and Utrecht University in The Netherlands have developed a previously elusive way to improve the selectivity of catalytic reactions, adding a new method of increasing the efficacy of catalysts for a potentially wide range of applications in various industries, including pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

Researchers from Yale University, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reported new findings on the behavior of metallic glass and how these materials deform or respond to external stresses at very small size scales. Their finding of the size limits (approximately 100 nanometers) at which metallic glass does not deform provides insights that could lead to new ways of creating metallic glasses and provide researchers with a novel method to slowly grow metastable materials. 

Purdue University researchers have merged the power of advanced surfaces with thermal imaging algorithms to create a device that could open new frontiers in machine vision and autonomous systems. The device, called a Spinning MetaCam, could help classify materials and provide new possibilities for technologies in security, thermography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. The Spinning MetaCam contains metasurfaces – structured electromagnetic nanoscale surfaces crafted to behave like aqueducts for water, filtering and channeling light.