A new catalyst can turn methane into something useful

MIT chemical engineers have devised a way to capture methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and convert it into polymers

09-Dec-2024 - Although it is less abundant than carbon dioxide, methane gas contributes disproportionately to global warming because it traps more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, due to its molecular structure. MIT chemical engineers have now designed a new catalyst that can convert methane into ...

Researchers develop a detector for continuously monitoring toxic gases

The material could be made as a thin coating to analyze air quality in industrial or home settings over time

22-May-2024 - Most systems used to detect toxic gases in industrial or domestic settings can be used only once, or at best a few times. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a detector that could provide continuous monitoring for the presence of these gases, at low cost. The new system combines two existing ...

Surprise! Weaker bonds can make polymers stronger

By adding weak linkers to a polymer network, chemists dramatically enhanced the material’s resistance to tearing

26-Jun-2023 - A team of chemists from MIT and Duke University has discovered a counterintuitive way to make polymers stronger: introduce a few weaker bonds into the material. Working with a type of polymer known as polyacrylate elastomers, the researchers found that they could increase the materials’ ...

A big leap toward tinier lines

29-Mar-2017 - For the last few decades, microchip manufacturers have been on a quest to find ways to make the patterns of wires and components in their microchips ever smaller, in order to fit more of them onto a single chip and thus continue the relentless progress toward faster and more powerful computers. ...

New theory overcomes a longstanding polymer problem

Technique for calculating elasticity could aid design of new materials

20-Sep-2016 - All polymers have a distinctive degree of elasticity — how much they will stretch when a force is applied. However, for the past 100 years, polymer scientists have been stymied in their efforts to predict polymers’ elasticity, because the materials usually have structural flaws at the molecular ...

3-D-printed structures 'remember' their shapes

30-Aug-2016 - Engineers from MIT and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) are using light to print three-dimensional structures that "remember" their original shapes. Even after being stretched, twisted, and bent at extreme angles, the structures -- from small coils and multimaterial flowers, ...

New method snips complex fibers into uniform particles

Stretching process can produce nanoscale rods or strips made of many material combinations.

08-Jun-2016 - An interdisciplinary team of researchers enabled by the National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) program has developed a way to break fibers or sheets of material into many tiny, almost perfectly uniform segments or strips. The method can work ...

Self-stacking nanogrids

Polymer nanowires could offer route to tinier chip components.

26-Jan-2016 - Since the 1960s, computer chips have been built using a process called photolithography. But in the past five years, chip features have gotten smaller than the wavelength of light, which has required some ingenious modifications of photolithographic processes. Keeping up the rate of circuit ...

New device uses carbon nanotubes to snag molecules

23-Dec-2015 - Engineers at MIT have devised a new technique for trapping hard-to-detect molecules, using forests of carbon nanotubes. The team modified a simple microfluidic channel with an array of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes -- rolled lattices of carbon atoms that resemble tiny tubes of chicken wire. ...

Surfaces get smooth or bumpy on demand

MIT research produces soft material with controllable surface textures that can be varied by squeezing

15-Jun-2015 - An MIT team has developed a way of making soft materials, using a 3-D printer, with surface textures that can then be modified at will to be perfectly smooth, or ridged or bumpy, or even to have complex patterns that could be used to guide fluids.The process, developed using detailed computer ...