Robotics
Whether it's a powered prosthesis to assist a person who has lost a limb or an independent robot navigating the outside world, we are asking machines to perform increasingly complex, dynamic tasks. But the standard electric ...
Mar 20, 2024
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Energy & Green Tech
A team of chemists from Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania, developed a new material for perovskite solar cells. After polymerization, it can be used as a hole transporting layer in both regular and inverted ...
Mar 19, 2024
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Engineering
John Dolbow, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke University and Oscar Lopez-Pamies, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have collaborated ...
Mar 19, 2024
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Energy & Green Tech
Imagine being able to wear your smartphone on your wrist, not as a watch, but literally as a flexible band that surrounds around your arm. How about clothes that charge your gadgets just by wearing them?
Mar 19, 2024
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13
Energy & Green Tech
Buildings and production of the materials used in their construction emit a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2), a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming and climate change. But storing CO2 in building materials ...
Mar 18, 2024
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Electronics & Semiconductors
A breakthrough could help lead to the development of new low-power semiconductors or quantum devices.
Mar 13, 2024
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Energy & Green Tech
A Dartmouth Engineering-led study published in Joule has reported the discovery of an entirely new high-performance material for solar absorbers—the central part of a solar cell that turns light into electricity—that ...
Mar 13, 2024
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Hardware
Computers work in digits—0s and 1s, to be exact. Their calculations are digital; their processes are digital; even their memories are digital. All of which require extraordinary power resources. As we look to the next evolution ...
Mar 13, 2024
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Energy & Green Tech
At one of Europe's largest chemical complexes, German group Covestro is trialing the manufacture of a key product using sugar as a base material instead of oil, as the industry seeks to reduce its carbon footprint.
Mar 10, 2024
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24
Engineering
Adhesive tape or sticky notes are easy to attach to a surface, but are difficult to remove. This phenomenon, known as adhesion hysteresis, can be fundamentally observed in soft, elastic materials: Adhesive contact is formed ...
Mar 8, 2024
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15
Material is synonymous with Substance, and is anything made of matter - hydrogen, air and water are all examples of materials. Sometimes the term Material is used more narrowly to refer to substances or components with certain physical properties which are used as inputs to production or manufacturing. In this sense, materials are the pieces required to make something else, from buildings and art to stars and computers.
A material can be anything: a finished product in its own right or an unprocessed raw material. Raw materials are first extracted or harvested from the earth and divided into a form that can be easily transported and stored, then processed to produce semi-finished materials. These can be input into a new cycle of production and finishing processes to create finished materials, ready for distribution, construction, and consumption.
An example of a raw material is cotton, which is harvested from plants, and can then be processed into thread (also considered a raw material), which can then be woven into cloth, a semi-finished material. Cutting and sewing the fabric turns it into a garment, which is a finished material. Steelmaking is another example—raw materials in the form of ore are mined, refined and processed into steel, a semi-finished material. Steel is then used as an input in many other industries to make finished products.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
