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Category: energy

Chemical impurities make carbon surfaces superslippery, researchers find

Engineers often treat impurities as a problem to eliminate to improve material performance. But new research from Osaka Metropolitan University and Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM suggests that in some cases, a little chemical messiness is exactly what helps materials slide more smoothly. The findings were published in Advanced Science.

When two surfaces slide or rub against each other, friction occurs. While friction is essential for many everyday applications, it also wears down machines, wastes energy and limits the lifespan of moving parts. Therefore, research has focused on achieving superlow friction, or superlubricity, in which surfaces can slide past one another with exceptionally low resistance.

“While graphene-or graphite-like structures are known to enable nearly frictionless sliding, creating and maintaining such structures in practical systems remains challenging,” said Takuya Kuwahara, lecturer at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Engineering and lead author of the study.

Non-Hermitian geometry reveals when quantum amplification depends only on start and end points

In quantum mechanics, the geometry of quantum states has emerged as a powerful framework for understanding phenomena ranging from electrical conductivity to superconductivity. One research direction aims to extend these geometric concepts to non-Hermitian quantum mechanics—where systems can exchange energy with their environment—including the generalization of the Berry phase, a key geometric quantity, to the non-Hermitian case.

However, many geometric properties unique to non-Hermitian quantum mechanics remain poorly understood.

“We knew geometry played a central role in ordinary quantum mechanics, but what genuinely new geometric effects might emerge in the non-Hermitian case was far from clear,” explains Tomoki Ozawa, a theoretical physicist at AIMR. “We wanted to identify geometric phenomena that are truly intrinsic to non-Hermitian quantum mechanics.”

Dead lithium batteries revived to 95% capacity via electrochemical bath

You know how rejuvenating a bath feels after a long day of work? Almost like you’re renewed. Turns out that’s not exclusive to humans. Scientists at Cornell University have developed an electrochemical bath that restores spent lithium-ion batteries to nearly 100% capacity.

Unlike conventional battery recycling methods that involve the complete physical destruction of batteries, followed by complex, energy-intensive recovery processes to extract critical battery-making materials, the scientists’ method recycles lithium-ion battery electrodes directly. Rather than breaking down structurally intact electrodes to extract materials that will make other electrodes, their approach regenerates the existing electrodes using an electrochemical solution.

The researchers say this method restored batteries to 95% of their original capacity, and even helped recycled batteries last longer. According to them, the method could also slash recycling costs by 56% while being more environmentally friendly.

Concrete that stores a day of electricity

In 2023, researchers at MIT and Harvard showed that ordinary cement, water, and a small amount of carbon black can be combined into a material that stores electricity, not in a battery embedded in the structure, but in the hardened concrete itself. As the cement hydrates, it consumes water and leaves a network of fine pores behind. The hydrophobic carbon black migrates into these spaces and self-assembles into a percolating, fractal-like electron-conducting network threaded through the calcium-silicate-hydrate (C-S-H) matrix. Soaked in an electrolyte and paired across a thin separator, two such electrodes form an electric double-layer capacitor, a supercapacitor, that stores charge electrostatically across an enormous internal surface area. The more interfacial surface inside the block, the more charge it holds. By the researchers’ calculation, a foundation-scale block of roughly 45 cubic metres, a cube about 3.5 metres across, could store on the order of 10 kilowatt-hours, comparable to a household’s average daily electricity use, while still bearing structural load. A 2025 follow-up reported a roughly tenfold increase in energy density, shrinking the volume needed for the same storage. This remains laboratory-scale work, demonstrated so far in small cells and prototypes, not a deployed foundation. Open questions include cycle life, self-discharge, and real-world scaling. References Chanut, N., Stefaniuk, D., Weaver, J. C., Zhu, Y., Shao-Horn, Y., Masic, A., & Ulm, F.-J. (2023). Carbon–cement supercapacitors as a scalable bulk energy storage solution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(32), e2304318120. Stefaniuk, D., Weaver, J. C., Ulm, F.-J., & Masic, A. (2025). High energy density carbon–cement supercapacitors for architectural energy storage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(40), e2511912122. PHENOMICA — contemplative, precise science, one phenomenon at a time. #science #materialscience #supercapacitor #energystorage #concrete …

This Sodium Battery From China Matched Tesla in a Surprising Head-to-Head Test

A new study found that a commercial sodium-ion battery from China rivals Tesla’s batteries in manufacturing quality and several key performance benchmarks.

With improvements to cold-weather charging and energy density, sodium-ion batteries could become a more affordable alternative for electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage.

Sodium-ion battery shows tesla-like quality in new study.

Growing a new ‘leaf’ that harnesses sun, water and CO2 to make liquid fuel

Bit.ly/4g59l7h

A Yale-led research team has developed the first standalone device that produces the liquid fuel methanol using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide as the ingredients.

The artificial “leaf,” like its namesake in nature, is a chemistry marvel. It brings the scientific mimicry of photosynthesis — the process of converting sunlight and water into chemical energy — to a new level, converting sunlight to methanol 32 times more efficiently than the previous conversion record for artificial leaf technologies that generate alcohol products.

Shocked Soil Discovered: Rare On Earth, But Abundant On Mars?

When a meteoroid strikes, it generates a wave of energy that moves faster than the speed of sound. When all that energy propagates through material in seconds or less before being quickly cooled and resolidified by a secondary wave, it produces glass.

Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Shawn Wright was looking for such glassy material while doing field work among the basaltic volcanic rock of Lonar crater in the Deccan region of India, when he found something unexpected.

“Some glassy samples were fluffy and light, like popcorn,” he said. “It had a really low density, it was airy, and it crumbled in my fingers. It looked different than all the other samples I’d seen and collected, so I aimed to find out what it was by trying to figure out what it used to be.”

Ultrasound propagation in porous rocks: Theory identifies three distinct wave modes

Ultrasound-based irradiation of rock formations has attracted considerable attention as a technique for enhancing heavy-oil (high-viscosity crude oil) recovery from deep underground reservoirs. However, a unified theoretical framework for wave propagation and energy dissipation in these formations remains lacking because water coexists with heavy oil within rock pores, and gas bubbles in the water respond dynamically to ultrasonic excitation, thereby creating a complex system.

Conventional theories typically treat oil as a purely viscous (Newtonian) fluid or assume frequency ranges markedly below the ultrasonic regime. Consequently, these theories inadequately capture oil viscoelasticity and the influence of bubble oscillations in the ultrasonic regime.

Researchers at University of Tsukuba have developed a theoretical framework to clarify the propagation of ultrasonic waves through complex materials such as rocks containing mixtures of oil, water, and gas bubbles. The work extends previous low-frequency models and constructs a theoretical framework applicable to ultrasonic frequencies by incorporating three notable elements into a unified system of equations: (i) heavy-oil viscoelasticity, (ii) dynamic capillary pressure at fluid-fluid interfaces, and (iii) oscillations of gas bubbles dispersed in water induced by ultrasonic pressure fluctuations.

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