Category Archives: Materials
Chemicals and fuels from plant waste
Both the depletion of fossil fuels and the environmental concerns are a powerful drive for the development of sustainable routes to commodity chemicals. Lignocellulose, comprised of lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose, is the ideal candidate, but its inherent complexity hampers its […]
Metals, greek letters and Earth’s core
Imagine a bucket filled with hard spheres. As these spheres are free to pack together as closely as geometry allows they tend to adopt a close-packed structure, a structure in which there is least unfilled space. X-ray diffraction studies […]
The 7 states of condensed matter at room temperature
In ‘Chemistry Essentials for Dummies‘, John T. Moore writes:
Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. It can exist in one of three classic states: solid, liquid, and gas. When a substance goes from one […]
Lightweighting strategies inspired by birds
Reducing weight in all kinds of vehicles is currently one of the hot topics for Materials Science and Product Design. This goal is directly related to one of the grand challenges that society is facing, that is, mitigate greenhouse gases […]
What bounds a molecular solid together?
We usually think of crystals as composed of different atoms in certain proportions, this proportion being the molecular fórmula that represents the crystal. However, it is not surprising that any molecule could be the basis of a crystal structure, whether […]
How to synthesize a nanoporous graphene that is both transistor and molecular sieve
Graphene is a two-dimensional allotrope of carbon made of hexagons. It is a zero-gap semimetal with a tiny overlap between valence and conductance bands. Since the isolation of graphene in 2004, considerable interest has been paid to exploring its […]
Spin control using chemical design
During the last decades, the electronics industry has been very successful in pushing forward the advancement of electronic building blocks, but the limit of silicon-based electronic devices especially in terms of miniaturization are almost reached. There are many ideas how […]
Mechanochemistry of nanographenes
Modern organic industrial chemistry started when William Henry Perkin serendipitously synthesized mauveine in 1856 while he was attempting the total synthesis of quinine. Since then, thousands of new organic products have been created in the laboratory for industrial purposes. Among […]
Accurate simulation of aqueous-based electrochemical setups
Following the need for new and renewable sources of energy worldwide, fuel cells using electrocatalysts can be thought of as viable options. Catalyst materials modify and increase the rate of chemical reactions without itself undergoing any permanent change. An electrocatalyst […]
What on earth is a polariton?
When I first started writing about condensed matter science I found some difficulties with a few purely physical concepts, being myself a chemist by education. One of those was ‘polariton’. After some years of reading solid state physics papers and […]