Materials & Manufacturing

Materials & Coatings

Access the technical resources for a range of materials and coatings. Design engineers can browse news, technical briefs, and applications for plastics, composites, rubbers, elastomers, and metals.

Stories

Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems

Process Creates Soft Actuated Objects Using Commercial Knitting Machines

This approach could be used to cost-effectively make soft robots and wearable technologies.

INSIDER: Photonics/Optics

Transparent Graphene Electrodes Might Lead to New Generation of Solar Cells

A new way of making large sheets of high-quality, atomically thin graphene could lead to ultra-lightweight, flexible solar cells, and to new classes of...

Question of the Week: Materials

Will Morphing Wings Take Off?

Our lead INSIDER story today showcased a morphing MADCAT aircraft wing. “From a first glance, it literally doesn’t look like anything that anyone’s ever seen before,” said MIT researcher Ben Jennet in our Here's an Idea episode. How about you? Will Morphing Wings Take Off?

Podcasts: Aerospace

A Morphing Airplane Wing Built by Tiny Robots

Ben Jennet is a PhD student at MIT and a former space research fellow at NASA. He is working with NASA to develop a new kind of aircraft wing that's flexible and changes mid-flight.

Briefs: Materials

Super-Fast Method for Ceramic Manufacturing

Scientists have reinvented a 26,000-year-old manufacturing process into an innovative approach to fabricating ceramic materials widely used in batteries, electronics, and extreme environments....

Q&A: Semiconductors & ICs

Q&A: Underwater Smart Glue Turns On and Off

An adhesive can be deactivated by applying a small voltage.

Application Briefs: Materials

Development Software Handles High-Integrity Space Applications

NASA needed help accurately measuring Earth-reflected sunlight.

Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems

Multi-Polymer Filament Increases Production from Low-Cost Printers

The new filament allows low-cost printers to produce parts with mechanical properties competitive with injection molded plastics.

Briefs: Automotive

Hardware Reduces Energy Draw of Artificial Intelligence

A quantum material could offset energy demand of artificial intelligence.

Briefs: Materials

Machine-Learning Tool for Developing Tougher Materials

This rapid screening system tests fracture resistance in billions of potential materials.

Briefs: Test & Measurement

Soft Prosthetic Hand Feels Surroundings via Stretchable Optical Waveguides

Sensors in the hand can actually detect forces being transmitted through the thickness of the robot.

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Semiconductors Can Behave Like Metals and Superconductors

This work potentially opens the door to advances like more energy-efficient electronic devices.

5 Ws: Lighting

5 Ws Of LEDs for 3D Metal Printing

In the operating room, you can produce bioresorbable metal implants, such as screws for bone fractures.

Briefs: Energy

Fabrication of Multilayer Ferritin Arrays

This method creates a thin-film electrode for a bio-nanobattery.

Briefs: Photonics/Optics

A Combined Optical Transmitter and Receiver

Researchers at Linköping University, together with colleagues in China, have developed a tiny unit that is both an optical transmitter and a receiver.

Briefs: Imaging

Unlocking the Gate to the Millisecond CT

A new CT scan method using intense synchrotron radiation produces higher quality images within milliseconds.

Technology Leaders: Photonics/Optics

ZERODUR: The Highly Technical Glass-Ceramic

Highly technical glass-ceramic delivers optical precision at nanometer scale.

Technology Leaders: Photonics/Optics

High Quality Optical Surfaces

Make sure the polished optic meets the requirement of a particular application.

INSIDER: Energy

Precision Spray Coating Makes Better Perovskite Solar Cells

Although perovskites are a promising alternative to silicon for solar cells, new manufacturing processes are needed to make them practical for commercial production. To help fill...

Question of the Week: Materials

Will More Manufacturers Go With Metal 3D Printing?

Our most recent issue of Tech Briefs featured a roundtable discussion about the future of 3D printing. The industry pros, including Stratsys Direct Manufacturing CEO Kent Firestone, spoke about how metal additive manufacturing has yet to catch on, due to cost constraints and build limitations. That...