An interdisciplinary team at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials, Germany, has identified exactly how dendrites grow and pierce ceramic electrolytes to trigger fractures that ultimately lead to battery failure.
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Researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, have developed a new Template-Constrained Additive printing technology inspired by tree root systems that enhances the mechanical robustness and precision of flexible electronic circuits, allowing them to withstand extreme conditions like high temperatures and mechanical wear, expanding their applications in smart robotics and advanced sensing systems.
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Beta (β)-type titanium (Ti) alloys are renowned for their strength, formability, and resistance to harsh environments, making them ideal for implants and prosthetics. However, under certain conditions, a brittle omega phase can form, making the material prone to breaking. While it is known that adding tin (Sn) negates this, and makes β-type Ti alloys stronger, the exact mechanics behind this continued to puzzle scientists. That is until researchers recently discovered a metallurgical cocktail effect to explain it.
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Harvard scientists, in collaboration with an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers, are exploring how cracks start, propagate, and end. Their findings, detailed in papers published in Nature Physics and AGU Advances, provide a deeper understanding of the lifecycle of fractures and could improve our understanding of material science, earthquakes, and production of geothermal energy, oil, and gas.
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Researchers at the Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently made a discovery that challenges the conventional understanding of fracture mechanics. The team, led by Dr. Meng Wang, Dr. Songlin Shi, and Prof. Jay Fineberg, experimentally demonstrated the existence of “supershear” tensile cracks that exceed classical speed limits and transition to near-supersonic velocities.
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For the first time, scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M. and Texas A&M University, have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process.
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Scientists describe how pieces of pure platinum and copper spontaneously healed cracks caused by metal fatigue during nanoscale experiments that had been designed to study how such cracks form and spread in metal placed under stress.
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