Metals Tech

Scientists are closer to giving the next generation of solar cells a powerful boost by integrating a process that could make the technology more efficient by breaking particles of light—photons—into small chunks. In a study published in Nature Chemistry researchers unravel the scientific understanding of what happens when light particles split—a process called singlet fission—and […]

An all-ceramic power pack rolled out by Japanese company TDK could soon provide your Apple and other products with much greater battery life — by a factor of 100. The latest breakthrough, CeraCharge, is coming out of the company’s Austria manufacturing facility, according to a TDK press release and video clip. The solid-state power pack […]

Semi-trucks move over 11 billion tons of freight in the US each year, spewing greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollutants along the highways as they go. Shifting these and other heavy-duty trucks to zero-emissions technologies will be a challenge—even more so than for smaller vehicles, since larger vehicles require bigger batteries and more powerful chargers. One […]

An international team of scientists has discovered that oxygen is produced by potato-shaped metallic nodules on the Pacific Ocean’s seafloor. The findings, published Monday in the Nature Geoscience journal, raise new concerns about the risks of deep-sea mining. The team, led by Professor Andrew Sweetman at the UK’s Scottish Association for Marine Science, found that oxygen is produced in […]

Power companies and electric grid developers turn to simulation tools as they attempt to understand how modern equipment will be affected by rapidly unfolding events in a complex grid. A challenging and particularly promising type of grid simulation, called electromagnetic transient analysis, or EMT, has the potential to enhance planners’ understanding of how modern power […]

Metal batteries have the potential to deliver more energy, at a lower weight, than the popular lithium-ion battery. The problem, however, is that the technology currently has too short a lifespan due to the highly reactive nature of the lithium metal within these batteries. New research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows where the […]

Daimler Truck AG can now produce its own battery cells and battery packs on a pilot line. The manufacturer intends to work on commercial vehicle-specific battery cells and next-generation truck batteries at the Battery Technology Centre (BTC), which has now opened. The opening in Mannheim, Germany, took place around a year after the topping-out ceremony. […]

Elon Musk might give up on Tesla’s 4680 battery cell if the situation doesn’t improve by the end of the year. Tesla’s 4680 battery cell, the automaker’s first effort to build its own cells, hasn’t gone smoothly, to say the least. First announced in 2020, it promised to enable significantly lower cost, more range, and […]

When electronic devices like laptops or smartphones overheat, they are fundamentally suffering from a nanoscale heat transfer problem. Pinpointing the source of that problem can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. “The building blocks of our modern electronics are transistors with nanoscale features, so to understand which parts of overheating, the […]

Large-scale neural network models form the basis of many AI-based technologies such as neuromorphic chips, which are inspired by the human brain. Training these networks can be tedious, time-consuming, and energy-inefficient given that the model is often first trained on a computer and then transferred to the chip. This limits the application and efficiency of […]