Decoupling the Effects of Interface Chemical Degradation and Mechanical Cracking in Solid-State Batteries with Silicon Electrode.

Silicon is a promising negative electrode material for solid-state batteries (SSBs) due to its high specific capacity and ability to prevent lithium dendrite formation. However, SSBs with silicon electrodes currently suffer from poor cycling stability, despite chemical engineering efforts. This study investigates the cycling failure mechanism of composite Si/LiPSCl electrodes by decoupling the effects of interface chemical degradation and mechanical cracking.

Reactive vapor-phase dealloying-alloying turns oxides into sustainable bulk nano-structured porous alloys.

For millennia, alloying has been the greatest gift from metallurgy to humankind: a process of mixing elements, propelling our society from the Bronze Age to the Space Age. Dealloying, by contrast, acts like a penalty: a corrosive counteracting process of selectively removing elements from alloys or compounds, degrading their structural integrity over time. We show that when these two opposite metallurgical processes meet in a reactive vapor environment, profound sustainable alloy design opportunities become accessible, enabling bulk nanostructured porous alloys directly from oxides, with zero carbon footprint.

Sustainable high-entropy materials?

High-entropy materials (HEMs) show inspiring structural and functional properties due to their multi-elemental compositions. However, most HEMs are burdened by cost-, energy-, and carbon-intensive extraction, synthesis, and manufacturing protocols. Recycling and reusing HEMs are challenging because their design relies on high fractions of expensive and limited-supply elements in massive solid solutions.

Grain Boundaries Control Lithiation of Solid Solution Substrates in Lithium Metal Batteries.

The development of sustainable transportation and communication systems requires an increase in both energy density and capacity retention of Li-batteries. Using substrates forming a solid solution with body-centered cubic Li enhances the cycle stability of anode-less batteries. However, it remains unclear how the substrate microstructure affects the lithiation behavior.

Two-gigapascal-strong ductile soft magnets.

Soft magnetic materials (SMMs) are indispensable for electromechanical energy conversion in high-efficiency applications, but they are exposed to increasing mechanical loading conditions in electric motors due to higher rotational speeds. Enhancing the yield strength of SMMs is essential to prevent the degradation in magnetic performance and failure from plastic deformation, yet most SMMs have yield strengths far below one gigapascal. Here, we present a multicomponent nanostructuring strategy that doubles the yield strength of SMMs while maintaining ductility.

Materials Design by Constructing Phase Diagrams for Defects.

Phase transformations and crystallographic defects are two essential tools to drive innovations in materials. Bulk materials design via tuning chemical compositions is systematized using phase diagrams. It is shown here that the same thermodynamic concept can be applied to manipulate the chemistry at defects.

Sustainable metals: integrating science and systems approaches.

This article introduces a special issue of the transactions arising from a Royal Society Discussion Meeting on 'sustainable metals'. Recognizing that progress to date toward the goals of 'sustainability' has been limited, the meeting aimed to open up a new level of interdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration and discussion of disruptive approaches. In this paper, the major concerns of sustainability are enumerated, and climate change is identified as the most urgent.

The dual problem of space: Relative player positioning determines attacking success in elite men's football.

The concept of space has been successfully modelled in football using spatiotemporal player data and Voronoi diagrams. Current approaches, however, are narrow in scope by focusing on an inter-team allocation of space to measure space . The present work extends this widespread perspective with an intra-team application of the Voronoi diagram and its dual Delaunay triangulation to measure space .

One step from oxides to sustainable bulk alloys.

Metallurgical production traditionally involves three steps: extracting metals from ores, mixing them into alloys by liquid processing and thermomechanical processing to achieve the desired microstructures. This sequential approach, practised since the Bronze Age, reaches its limit today because of the urgent demand for a sustainable economy: almost 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions are because of the use of fossil reductants and high-temperature metallurgical processing. Here we present a H-based redox synthesis and compaction approach that reforms traditional alloy-making by merging metal extraction, alloying and thermomechanical processing into one single solid-state operation.

Green Ironmaking at Higher H Pressure: Reduction Kinetics and Microstructure Formation During Hydrogen-Based Direct Reduction of Hematite Pellets.

Hydrogen-based direct reduction (HyDR) of iron ores has attracted immense attention and is considered a forerunner technology for sustainable ironmaking. It has a high potential to mitigate CO emissions in the steel industry, which accounts today for ~ 8-10% of all global CO emissions. Direct reduction produces highly porous sponge iron via natural-gas-based or gasified-coal-based reducing agents that contain hydrogen and organic molecules.

Role of grain-level chemo-mechanics in composite cathode degradation of solid-state lithium batteries.

Solid-state Li-ion batteries, based on Ni-rich oxide cathodes and Li-metal anodes, can theoretically reach a high specific energy of 393 Wh kg and hold promise for electrochemical storage. However, Li intercalation-induced dimensional changes can lead to crystal defect formation in these cathodes, and contact mechanics problems between cathode and solid electrolyte. Understanding the interplay between cathode microstructure, operating conditions, micromechanics of battery materials, and capacity decay remains a challenge.

Strong and ductile Resinvar alloys with temperature- and time-independent resistivity.

Materials with well-defined electrical resistivity that does not change with temperature or time are important in robotics, communication and automation. However, the challenge of designing such materials has remained elusive due to the temperature-dependent electron-phonon scattering. Moreover, resistive electrical conductors used in flexible and mobile systems under high mechanical loads must possess both high strength and ductility.

Thermal Kinetics and Nitriding Effect of Ammonia-Based Direct Reduction of Iron Oxides.

Ammonia is a promising alternative hydrogen carrier that can be utilized for the solid-state reduction of iron oxides for sustainable ironmaking due to its easy transportation and high energy density. The main challenge for its utilization on an industrial scale is to understand the reaction kinetics under different process conditions and the associated nitrogen incorporation in the reduced material that originates from ammonia decomposition. In this work, the effect of temperature on the reduction efficiency and nitride formation is investigated through phase, local chemistry, and gas evolution analysis.

Thermodynamics-Guided High-Throughput Discovery of Eutectic High-Entropy Alloys for Rapid Solidification.

Excellent castability, significantly refined microstructure, and good mechanical properties make eutectic high-entropy alloys (EHEAs) a natural fit for rapid solidification processes, e.g., additive manufacturing.

Shearing brittle intermetallics enhances cryogenic strength and ductility of steels.

Precipitates are crucial for crafting mechanically strong metallic materials. In this work, we report the dislocation cutting of B2 (ordered body-centered cubic) nanoprecipitates, typically considered nonshearable intermetallics, in a lightweight compositionally complex steel during cryogenic tensile loading. Shearing is enabled by the high strength level for dislocation glide within the austenitic matrix, attributed to the substantial strengthening from subnanoscale local chemical ordering zones and the pronounced solid solution strengthening from the multiprincipal elements in the matrix.

Chemo-mechanical failure mechanisms of the silicon anode in solid-state batteries.

Silicon is a promising anode material due to its high theoretical specific capacity, low lithiation potential and low lithium dendrite risk. Yet, the electrochemical performance of silicon anodes in solid-state batteries is still poor (for example, low actual specific capacity and fast capacity decay), hindering practical applications. Here the chemo-mechanical failure mechanisms of composite Si/LiPSCl and solid-electrolyte-free silicon anodes are revealed by combining structural and chemical characterizations with theoretical simulations.

Green steel from red mud through climate-neutral hydrogen plasma reduction.

Red mud is the waste of bauxite refinement into alumina, the feedstock for aluminium production. With about 180 million tonnes produced per year, red mud has amassed to one of the largest environmentally hazardous waste products, with the staggering amount of 4 billion tonnes accumulated on a global scale. Here we present how this red mud can be turned into valuable and sustainable feedstock for ironmaking using fossil-free hydrogen-plasma-based reduction, thus mitigating a part of the steel-related carbon dioxide emissions by making it available for the production of several hundred million tonnes of green steel.

How solute atoms control aqueous corrosion of Al-alloys.

Aluminum alloys play an important role in circular metallurgy due to their good recyclability and 95% energy gain when made from scrap. Their low density and high strength translate linearly to lower greenhouse gas emissions in transportation, and their excellent corrosion resistance enhances product longevity. The durability of Al alloys stems from the dense barrier oxide film strongly bonded to the surface, preventing further degradation.

Accelerating the design of compositionally complex materials via physics-informed artificial intelligence.

The chemical space for designing materials is practically infinite. This makes disruptive progress by traditional physics-based modeling alone challenging. Yet, training data for identifying composition-structure-property relations by artificial intelligence are sparse.

Strong and ductile high temperature soft magnets through Widmanstätten precipitates.

Fast growth of sustainable energy production requires massive electrification of transport, industry and households, with electrical motors as key components. These need soft magnets with high saturation magnetization, mechanical strength, and thermal stability to operate efficiently and safely. Reconciling these properties in one material is challenging because thermally-stable microstructures for strength increase conflict with magnetic performance.

Analysis of contextualized intensity in Men's elite handball using graph-based deep learning.

Manual annotation of data in invasion games is a costly task which poses a natural limit on sample sizes and the level of granularity used in match and performance analyses. To overcome this challenge, this work introduces FAUPA-ML, a Framework for Automatic Upscaled Performance Analysis with Machine Learning, which leverages graph neural networks to scale domain-specific expert knowledge to large data sets. Networks were trained using position data of match phases (counter/position attacks), annotated manually by domain experts in 10 matches.

Synchronization of passes in event and spatiotemporal soccer data.

The majority of soccer analysis studies investigates specific scenarios through the implementation of computational techniques, which involve the examination of either spatiotemporal position data (movement of players and the ball on the pitch) or event data (relating to significant situations during a match). Yet, only a few applications perform a joint analysis of both data sources despite the various involved advantages emerging from such an approach. One possible reason for this is a non-systematic error in the event data, causing a temporal misalignment of the two data sources.

Enhancing corrosion-resistant alloy design through natural language processing and deep learning.

We propose strategies that couple natural language processing with deep learning to enhance machine capability for corrosion-resistant alloy design. First, accuracy of machine learning models for materials datasets is often limited by their inability to incorporate textual data. Manual extraction of numerical parameters from descriptions of alloy processing or experimental methodology inevitably leads to a reduction in information density.

Fundamentals of Green Steel Production: On the Role of Gas Pressure During Hydrogen Reduction of Iron Ores.

Unlabelled: Out of the multitude of researched processing routes for sustainable ironmaking, hydrogen-based direct reduction and hydrogen plasma smelting reduction (HyPSR) are currently the most promising candidates for a successful industrial application. Both processes operate under gaseous atmospheres, which turn the partial and absolute pressure of hydrogen into a relevant process parameter. Here, we present first insights into the influence of total pressure and concentration of hydrogen on the reduction of hematite, focusing on the more pressure-sensitive route (HyPSR).