MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Anoop Krishnan from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India, about a machine learning model developed after a two-year period of collecting data from the cement industry, supported by the Cement and Concrete Research Network. Krishnan’s work resulted in a model that predicts the alite, belite, and ferrite content in the clinker produced by a given cement p...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Christos Athanasiou from the Georgia Institute of Technology about their approach to the recycling problem from a mechanics-materials perspective. Current recycling approaches can lead to a product with variable properties, which is undesirable. Through a bio-inspired design, Athanasiou’s group built a structure similar to bricks and mortar where the bricks, measuring a ...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Bharat Gwalani from North Carolina State University and Mert Efe from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory about their single-step, energy-efficient method for making a samarium cobalt magnet. Using a process they call “friction stir consolidation,” the researchers apply heat and pressure simultaneously to fuse the two powders together. Their method results in low poro...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Yaroslava Yingling and Joseph Tracy from North Carolina State University about their study on iron oxide colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) coated in oleylamine ligands. By combining experimental work with molecular simulations, their research group determined how to optimize ethanol solvent-mediated ligand stripping in order to control the functionality of the NPs. This work...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Thomas White from the University of Nevada, Reno, about his research group’s work on superheating gold. By hitting the gold foil with 45 femtosecond blue laser pulses, the team heated the foil uniformly up to 14 times hotter than its melting point while maintaining the material’s crystal structure. To confirm the temperature, the group introduced a thermometry technique...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Sathvik Iyengar, a PhD candidate at Rice University, about the development of a hybrid material called “glaphene.” A hybrid of graphene and two-dimensional (2D) silica glass, glaphene is a semiconductor with a bandgap of ~4 eV. More importantly, Iyengar and colleagues introduce a new method of bandgap engineering using hybrid materials instead of doping, which opens new ...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Victor Lopez-Richard from Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil about his memory device called a mem-emitter. Unlike a memresistor (short for “memory resistor”), which made of materials whose electrical resistance can be tuned, the mem-emitter is used to tune optical properties. Experimentally, Lopez-Richard’s research group made the device out of molybdenum disele...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Ashley Bucsek from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor about her laboratory-scale three-dimensional (3D) x-ray diffraction (XRD) microscope to replace studies done in synchrotron facilities. A key element of the design is the material used to make the x-rays. Instead of using a solid metal as a target, Bucsek’s research group used a liquid metal source to generate the...

To enable future lunar settlements, researchers are pursuing ways to construct needed devices on the moon to save the expense of shipping them from Earth. In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Felix Lang from the University of Potsdam, Germany about his group’s development of perovskite solar cells that utilize the moon’s regolith for the substrate. The researchers achieved power conversion efficiency of ~10...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Sheng Xu from Tohoku University, Japan about his lightweight shape memory alloy that retains superelasticity at temperatures as cold as 4 K and as hot as 400°C. This range is about 5 times wider than commercial shape memory alloys. Shape memory alloys are needed for extreme environments such as part of machines in space or deep sea. Xu also sees uses for biomedical appl...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Hang Zhang from Aalto University in Finland about his group’s creation of a composite material that is both stiff and self-healing. The composite involves a hydrogel where the long polymer chains are confined between nanosheets of synthetic hectorite. This material mimics skin that is both stiff and self-healing. Applications may be forthcoming in self-healing soft robot...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Lane Martin from Rice University about characterization of relaxor ferroelectrics, materials with noteworthy energy-conversion properties used in sensors and actuators. Martin’s research team investigated the material’s behavior at the nanoscale. The researchers found that the specific thin film they studied—the alloy lead magnesium niobate lead titanate—exhibited excel...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Beth Dickey from Carnegie Mellon University about her new approach to inducing ferroelectricity into a material. Dickey’s research group worked with a class of materials known as wurtzites. The researchers specifically studied aluminum nitride and zinc oxide, which are not ferroelectric in their pristine form at room temperature. However, alloys of these materials are f...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Harry Atwater from the California Institute of Technology about his study on lightsail propulsion in order to understand how the device can be developed to do fly-by space travel riding a beam of laser light. Atwater’s research group made a square prototype device where the researchers incorporated springs at each corner, etched out of a single sheet of silicon nitride, ...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Ashwin Shahani and Alan Taub from the University of Michigan about their group’s simulations and experimental work detailing the formation mechanisms, morphologies, and microstructures of an in situ Al/TiC metal matrix nanocomposites processed via salt flux reaction. Using these insights, the microstructure of a material can be tuned in order to optimize the materials pr...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Xingchen Ye of Indiana University about his research group’s studies on the fundamental behavior of colloidal materials. Colloidal materials consist of liquids with nanoparticles suspended in them. Ye’s team is interested in how a colloidal material’s properties change as the team spatially rearranges the nanoparticles in the liquid. They looked specifically at the self...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Fabian Meder from the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Piza, Italy about his research group’s device that makes use of wind-driven plant leaf motion to generate electricity which can power a chemical delivery system. Their triboelectric nanogenerator involves an artificial leaf made of a 500 μm silicone elastomer l...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Bowen Deng, a graduate student in Gerbrand Ceder’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, about their work on increasing the accuracy of artificial intelligence/machine learning materials prediction models. The use of computer simulations to predict the interaction between atoms in a given molecule is being replaced by machine learning. Researchers describe th...