ScienceDaily: Engineering and Construction News

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• Looking deep inside a working lithium-ion battery
• Layered graphene sandwich for next generation electronics
• Doped graphene nanoribbons with potential
• Continuing Bragg legacy of structure determination
• Rethinking the basic science of graphene synthesis

Looking deep inside a working lithium-ion battery Posted: 08 Sep 2014 09:00 AM PDT In an unprecedented view inside a working lithium-ion battery, researchers used a neutron beam to "see" the flow of lithium in real time, as the battery charged and discharged. What they saw could one day help explain why rechargeable batteries lose capacity over time, and why they even sometimes catch fire.

Layered graphene sandwich for next generation electronics Posted: 08 Sep 2014 06:36 AM PDT Sandwiching layers of graphene with white graphene could produce designer materials capable of creating high-frequency electronic devices, scientists have found.

Doped graphene nanoribbons with potential Posted: 08 Sep 2014 05:33 AM PDT Graphene possesses many outstanding properties: it conducts heat and electricity, it is transparent, harder than diamond and extremely strong. But in order to use it to construct electronic switches, a material must not only be an outstanding conductor, it should also be switchable between "on" and "off" states. This requires the presence of a so-called bandgap, which enables semiconductors to be in an insulating state. The problem, however, is that the bandgap in graphene is extremely small. Empa researchers from the "nanotech@surfaces" laboratory thus developed a method some time ago to synthesize a form of graphene with larger bandgaps by allowing ultra-narrow graphene nanoribbons to "grow" via molecular self-assembly.

Continuing Bragg legacy of structure determination Posted: 07 Sep 2014 03:06 PM PDT Over 100 years since the Nobel Prize-winning father and son team Sir William and Sir Lawrence Bragg pioneered the use of X-rays to determine crystal structure, researchers have made significant new advances in the field.

Rethinking the basic science of graphene synthesis Posted: 07 Sep 2014 03:06 PM PDT A new route to making graphene could make the 21st century's wonder material easier to ramp up to industrial scale. Graphene -- a tightly bound single layer of carbon atoms with super strength and the ability to conduct heat and electricity better than any other known material -- has potential industrial uses that include flexible electronic displays, high-speed computing, stronger wind turbine blades, and more efficient solar cells, to name just a few under development.

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