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Category: space – Page 972

Accelerating electrocatalyst discovery with machine learning

Researchers are paving the way to total reliance on renewable energy as they study both large- and small-scale ways to replace fossil fuels. One promising avenue is converting simple chemicals into valuable ones using renewable electricity, including processes such as carbon dioxide reduction or water splitting. But to scale these processes up for widespread use, we need to discover new electrocatalysts—substances that increase the rate of an electrochemical reaction that occurs on an electrode surface. To do so, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are looking to new methods to accelerate the discovery process: machine learning.

Zack Ulissi, an assistant professor of chemical engineering (ChemE), and his group are using machine learning to guide electrocatalyst discovery. By hand, researchers spend hours doing routine calculations on materials that may not end up working. Ulissi’s team has created a system that automates these routine calculations, explores a large search space, and suggests new alloys that have promising properties for electrocatalysis.

“This allows us to spend our time asking science questions, like, ‘How do you predict the properties of something,’ ‘What is the thermodynamic model,’ ‘What is the model of the system,’ or ‘How do you represent the system?’” said Ulissi.

A new dimension for batteries

Engineers at the University of Maryland have created a thin battery, made of a few million carefully constructed “microbatteries” in a square inch. Each microbattery is shaped like a very tall, round room, providing much surface area – like wall space – on which nano-thin battery layers are assembled. The thin layers together with large surface area produces very high power along with high energy. It is dubbed a “3D battery” because each microbattery has a distinctly 3D shape.

These 3D batteries push conventional planar thin-film solid state batteries into a third dimension. Planar batteries are a single stack of flat layers serving the roles of anode, electrolyte, cathode and current collectors.

But to make the 3D batteries, the researchers drilled narrow holes are formed in silicon, no wider than a strand of spider silk but many times deeper. The were coated on the interior walls of the deep holes. The increased wall surface of the 3D microbatteries provides increased energy, while the thinness of the layers dramatically increases the power that can be delivered. The process is a little more complicated and expensive than its flat counterpart, but leads to more energy and higher power in the same footprint.

In ‘Nature’: A nanoscale discovery with big implications

A recent discovery by William & Mary and University of Michigan researchers transforms our understanding of one of the most important laws of modern physics. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, has broad implications for science, impacting everything from nanotechnology to our understanding of the solar system.

“This changes everything, even our ideas about planetary formation,” said Mumtaz Qazilbash, associate professor of physics at William & Mary and co-author on the paper. “The full extent of what this means is an important question and, frankly, one I will be continuing to think about.”

Qazilbash and two W&M graduate students, Zhen Xing and Patrick McArdle, were asked by a team of engineers from the University of Michigan to help them test whether Planck’s radiation law, a foundational scientific principle grounded in quantum mechanics, applies at the smallest length scales.

ELiSE — Generative engineering with bionic lightweight design for 3D-printing

The German start-up company ELiSE creates the DNA of a technical part. Based on the DNA, automated design processes are used to find the best solution which considers all predefined constraints and which is produced by additive manufacturing. Meet ELiSE at ESA’s Start-ups Zone powered by ESA space solutions at IAC 2018.

Flying to the stars

Almost anyone who has looked into the night sky has wondered if we could ever travel to the stars. Today, for the first time in history, we might be only decades away from sending a spacecraft to a star, reaching it within the 21st century. Here, Andreas Hein looks into the possibilities and challenges associated with getting to the stars and asks if humans will ever set foot on an exoplanet.

Flying to another star is incredibly difficult, first and foremost due to the distances involved. Imagine for a moment that the distance between our Sun and the Earth is one metre. The Sun would be the size of a grain of salt on this scale. Still, the closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be more than 265 km away. At this scale, the farthest human-made object, the Voyager 1 probe, would be at a distance of about 141 metres from the Sun, increasing its distance by about 3.6 metres per year. In reality Voyager 1 flies at an astonishing velocity of 17 km/s; at this velocity, a flight to Proxima Centauri would take about 75,000 years. This timescale sounds hopeless but it does also mean that, in principle, we can already send spacecraft to other stars. Voyager 1 is heading towards the star Gliese 445 and Voyager 2 towards Sirius.

When we talk about interstellar travel however, we commonly mean that we can reach another star within an acceptable timeframe. What is an ‘acceptable timeframe’ though? The team that designed the Daedalus spacecraft, a hypothetical fusion-propelled interstellar probe, argued that an acceptable trip duration would be about the working life of a scientist, roughly 50 years. Breakthrough Starshot, an ongoing project for laser-propelled interstellar probes, is aiming at 20 years to Proxima Centauri.

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