That’s the estimate of Jay Chmelauskas, President of Western Lithium who said in a company press release, “As an electric car owner, the move to automobile electrification now seems obvious and imminent. Production of lithium in Nevada not only has the benefit of long-term mining and chemical industry jobs, but also has the potential to support downstream technology and manufacturing jobs in America.  Lithium is the enabling metal for electric transportation.”

Western Lithium USA Corporation, which is publicly traded, announced the completion of a positive pre-feasibility study for its wholly owned Kings Valley Lithium Project in Nevada, USA.

Two scenarios have been evaluated from work products by a collaboration of independent industry specialist firms including Tetra Tech, Inc., Reserva International, LLC and K-UTEC AG Salt Technologies.

The first is a startup scenario based on mining and processing ore at a design throughput rate of 2,100 (tons here are metric or 2200 lbs) tons per day (13,000 tons per annum lithium carbonate), and second, a full production scenario to double production four years after startup (26,000 tons per annum lithium carbonate).

The study demonstrates that the project could produce lithium carbonate at an estimated average cash cost, net of by-product credits, of $968 per ton once full production of 26,000 tons per year lithium carbonate is achieved. Initial startup capital, including contingency is expected to be approximately $248 million. Incremental development capital to double lithium carbonate production to 26,000 tons per year is estimated at approximately $161 million. Sustaining capital of $40 million including contingency, is primarily composed of surface mine equipment, expansions of dry stack tailings and surface water management, and the mine’s closure.

The startup scenario for lithium carbonate production is expected to commence in 2015 at an annual rate of 13,000 tons per year. Full production of 26,000 tons per year is planned four years after initial startup, if demand for lithium increases.

Optimistic, Chmelauskas takes us further by saying, “Upcoming key milestones for the company include; submission of the Plan of Operations to the Bureau of Land Management initiating the formal permitting process (Q1 2012), starting construction of a lithium carbonate demonstration plant, and commencing work on a definitive feasibility study in 2012. We believe that there is a strong future for electrification and that the Stakeholders of Western Lithium and Nevada can strongly benefit and profit from this industry.”  We all hope the Bureau of Land Management is the only bureaucracy they have to deal with.

The Kings Valley Lithium Project is located in Humboldt County, Nevada, approximately 62 miles north-northwest of Winnemucca along U.S. Highway 95 to Orovada and then 25 miles west-northwest of Orovada, Nevada on paved State Highway 293. Western Lithium has claims that encompass five areas of lithium mineralization.  These five areas are covered by 1,049 Federal unpatented claims over an area of 8,480 hectares.

Mineral Reserves

Kings Valley Ore Reserves
at 0.320% Lithium Cut-off

Note: 95% Mine Recovery Factor Applied. Please see the Company’s additional disclosure of risks and uncertainties surrounding potassium and sodium in its continuous disclosure filings at the company’s website www.westernlithium.com.

The reserve estimate takes into consideration all geologic, mining, processing, and economic factors.

Sharp observers will note the potassium available as well.

Highlights include:

•    Nominal production of by-product potassium sulfate and sodium sulfate of 90,000 and 100,000 tons per year, respectively;
•    20 year mine life, processing 25.5 million tons of ore at an average grade of 0.40% lithium using a 0.320% cut-off grade;

•    The project benefits from established infrastructure including road access, power supply and a local water source;
•    Based on commodity prices of $6,000 per ton lithium carbonate, $600 per ton potassium sulfate, and $75 per ton sodium sulfate;
•    Overall recoveries are expected to be 87.2% for lithium, 77.7% for potassium and 82.7% for sodium.

To measure against those highlights these numbers might be kept in mind:

•    Cash operating costs distributed between the individual products are: lithium carbonate $3,011 per ton, potassium sulfate $87 per ton, sodium sulfate $36 per ton.

Obviously the company expects to do very well.  Even with some lithium price pull down the numbers look pretty good.  That’s a good thing for the economy in North America.

Western Lithium is a Canadian company, which comes at no surprise considering the U.S. economy and the U.S. government’s attitude toward business through regulations and capital controls with the new financial regulation law.  Americans should count their blessings that the lithium was found here and there is a friendly neighbor with their economic act together well enough to get development underway.

Luckily for we writers the conservation of angular momentum is easy to visualize and discuss (simpler Wikipedia page). (Save those emails, just add your voice to the comments.)  By taking some liberty in terms, the conservation is about holding the energy as a mass circles tied to a point.  You can see the conservation as a figure skater draws in the arms and gains rotating speed – the mass has conserved the energy with more speed in a smaller circle – and when the arms come out the energy in the mass is still about the same as the mass travels slower around a larger circle.  Isaac Newton figured this out and set it to mathematics in his second law of mechanics.

What’s happening is an object in motion trying to stay in motion.  A particle going 100 inches a minute in a straight line pulled into a one-inch diameter circle is going to get around 100 times in a minute.  Open the circle up to a 4-inch diameter circle and it will get around 25 times. The impact energy from a particle stop will be the same.  Physics in nature has managed some marvelous examples, the gyroscope stays put; the earth revolves around the sun, the moon around the earth, the whole solar system works and galaxy as well.

The MSU team set out to use the conservation of angular momentum to understand how molecules move energy around following the absorption of light. In the current issue of Science (available in full as a pdf document from MSU), MSU chemist Jim McCusker demonstrates for the first time the effect is real and also suggests how scientists could use it to control and predict chemical reaction pathways in general.

The notion CAM was at work in chemistry was first floated back in 1927 when E. Wigner introduced the notion of spin conservation in chemical reactions where a chemical reaction would be designated “spin-allowed” if the spin angular momentum space spanned by the reactants intersects the spin angular momentum space spanned by the reaction’s products.

CAM in Chemistry Scientists McCusker and Guo. Click image for the largest view. Image Credit: Michigan State University.

Jim McCusker takes us forward with, “The idea has floated around for decades and has been implicitly invoked in a variety of contexts, but no one had ever come up with a chemical system that could demonstrate whether or not the underlying concept was valid. Our result not only validates the idea, but it really allows us to start thinking about chemical reactions from an entirely different perspective.”

McCusker and his team used two closely related molecules that were specifically designed to undergo a chemical reaction known as fluorescence resonance energy transfer, or FRET. Upon absorption of light, the system is predisposed to transfer that energy from one part of the molecule to another.

Then they changed the identity of one of the atoms in the molecule from chromium to cobalt. This altered the molecule’s properties and shut down the reaction. The absence of any detectable energy transfer in the cobalt-containing compound confirmed the hypothesis.

McCusker said, “What we have successfully conducted is a proof-of-principle experiment. One can easily imagine employing these ideas to other chemical processes, and we’re actually exploring some of these avenues in my group right now.”

The team says in the paper, “. . .  it does not appear to us that this formalism should be limited to energy transfer. In principle, a parallel set of expressions for any chemical reaction could be drafted in which consideration of reactant and product angular momenta serves to differentiate various thermodynamically viable pathways. It seems likely that the issues raised herein will manifest more readily in inorganic rather than organic systems because of the broader array of spin states generally accessible in such compounds.”

The expectation here is the use of CAM is going to have immediate application to catalyst research.  The intensity of interest in organic reactions is very high for creating fuels and in solving the catalyst issues in fuel cells.  The documentation of CAM or “spin-allowed” molecules could take off at a furious pace when a few applications are published.

It’s certainly a Happy New Year for the chemists – if they’re up on their calculus and physics.

Erbium Chloride Silicate Ball and Stick Model. Click image for more info.

Arizona State University researchers have created a new crystal material compound called erbium chloride silicate.  Electrical engineering professor Cun-Zheng Ning at ASU says the material can be used to develop the next generations of computers, improve the capabilities of the Internet, increase the efficiency of silicon-based photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight into electrical energy, and enhance the quality of solid-state lighting and sensor technology.

Erbium Metal Sample.

To start, erbium is one of the most important members of the rare earth family in the periodic table of chemical elements. It emits photons in the wavelength range of 1.5 micrometers, which are used in the optical fibers essential to high-quality performance of the Internet and telephones.  Thus, erbium is used in doping optical fibers to amplify the signals of Internet and telephone telecommunications systems.

Next, doping is the term used to describe the process of inserting low concentrations of various elements into other substances as a way to alter the electrical or optical properties of the substances to produce the desired results. The elements used in such processes are referred to as “dopants”.

The ASU breakthrough involves the first-ever synthesis of a new erbium compound in the form of a single-crystal nanowire, which has superior properties compared to erbium compounds in other forms.  Details about the new compound are reported in the Optical Materials Express on the website of the Optical Society of America.

Professor Ning explains, “Since we could not dope as many erbium atoms in a fiber as we wish, fibers had to be very long to be useful for amplifying an Internet signal. This makes integrating Internet communications and computing on a chip very difficult.”

“With the new erbium compound, 1,000 times more erbium atoms are contained in the compound. This means many devices can be integrated into a chip-scale system,” he said. “Thus the new compound materials containing erbium can be integrated with silicon to combine computing and communication functionalities on the same inexpensive silicon platform to increase the speed of computing and Internet operation at the same time.”

The next major application field is solar cells where erbium materials can also be used to increase the energy-conversion efficiency.  Silicon does not absorb solar radiation with wavelengths longer than 1.1 microns, leaving longer wavelengths unused — shorting solar cell efficiency.

Erbium materials can remedy the situation by converting two or more photons of longer wavelengths carrying small amounts of energy into one photon that is carrying a larger amount of energy. The single, more powerful photons can then be absorbed by silicon, thus increasing the efficiency of solar cells.

Part two in solar cells is erbium materials also help absorb ultraviolet light from the sun and convert it into photons carrying small amounts of energy, which can then be more efficiently converted into electricity by silicon cells.

The third industrial application is the color-conversion function of turning ultraviolet light into other visible colors of light that’s important in generating white light for solid-state lighting devices.

Here’s why this matters, as Ning explains further that erbium’s importance is well-recognized, producing erbium materials of high quality has been challenging.  The standard approach is to introduce erbium as a dopant into various host materials, such as silicon oxide, silicon, and many other crystals and glasses.

Ning explains, “One big problem has been that we have not been able to introduce enough erbium atoms into crystals and glasses without degrading optical quality, because too many of these kinds of dopants would cluster, which lowers the optical quality.”

The Ning group solution is synthesizing a new erbium material such that the erbium is no longer randomly introduced as a dopant. Then the erbium is part of a uniform compound and the number of erbium atoms is a factor of 1,000 times more than the maximum amount that can be introduced in other erbium-doped materials.

The effect is the number of erbium atoms provides more optical activity to produce stronger lighting and enhances the conversion of different colors of light into white light to produce higher-quality solid-state lighting and enables solar cells to more efficiently convert sunlight in electrical energy.

Plus erbium atoms are organized in a periodic array, they do not cluster in this new compound, leading one to think that processing and application costs could be reduced.

The Ning group’s story has an interesting start – the synthesis of this new erbium material was made somewhat by accident, “Similar to what other researchers are doing, we were originally trying to dope erbium into silicon nanowires. But the characteristics demonstrated by the material surprised us,” he says. “We got a new material. We did not know what it was, and there was no published document that described it. It took us more than a year to finally realize we got a new single-crystal material no one else had produced.”

Ning and his team are now experimenting to use the new erbium compound for various applications, such as increasing silicon solar cell efficiency and making miniaturized optical amplifiers for chip-scale photonic systems for computers and high-speed Internet fiber and lasers.

“Most importantly,” he says, “there are many things we have yet to learn about what can be achieved with use of the material. Our preliminary studies of its characteristics show it has many amazing properties and superior optical quality. More exciting discoveries are waiting to be made.”

In the U.S. where Internet speeds are far slower than in some other parts of the world this news isn’t so remarkable.  But data volume is growing fast and improved fiber is going to matter sooner than many realize.   Then the solar cell industry still needs to gain technology to reduce costs further, there is a long way to go and if erbium doping pulls more energy for low cost process the improved harvest will help drive more adoption.

Erbium doping isn’t a big issue, but a major improvement in the science will have a big effect on some important big ones.

After more than a decade of research, the team devised a means for developing freestanding, ultra-thin zeolite nanosheets that as thin films can speed up the filtration process and require less energy. The team has a provisional patent and hopes to commercialize the technology.

Zeolite Crystals Buillt As Sheets

Considered a breakthrough, the research led by chemical engineering and materials science professor Michael Tsapatsis in the university’s College of Science and Engineering, has been published in the most recent issue of the journal Science.

Separating mixed substances can require considerable amounts of energy, with current estimates running about 15 percent of the total energy consumption, with much wasted due to process inefficiencies. When fuel was abundant and inexpensive, separation technology was not a major consideration when designing industrial separation processes such as distillation for purifying gasoline and polymer precursors. But as energy prices rise and policies promote efficiency, the need for more energy-efficient alternatives has expanded.

The leading field for more energy-efficient separations is high-resolution molecular separation with membranes.  Membranes perform adsorption and/or sieving of molecules with minute size and shape differences much like a filter.  Among the candidates for selective separation membranes, zeolite materials (crystals with molecular-sized pores) show particular promise.

Zeolites have been used as adsorbents and catalysts for several decades.  But there have been substantial challenges in organizing zeolitic crystal materials into extended sheets that remain intact. To enable energy-savings technology, scientists needed to develop cost-effective, reliable and scalable deposition methods for building thin film zeolite sheets.

The University of Minnesota team’s innovation is to use sound waves in a specialized centrifuge process to develop “carpets” of flaky crystal-type nanosheets that are not only flat, but have just the right amount of thickness. The resulting product can be used to separate molecules as a sieve or as a membrane barrier in both research and industrial applications.

Kumar Varoon, a University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science Ph.D. candidate and one of the primary authors of the paper said, “We think this discovery holds great promise in commercial applications. This material has good coverage and is very thin. It could significantly reduce production costs in refineries and save energy.”

Folks in the fuel business have to be cheered up with this news.  In petroleum refining heat is a major cost and consumes a sizable share of the incoming energy to function.  Any substitution that costs less would put the energy back into the market as well, releasing much more fuel to market  In Biofuels an important expense is in separation technology and case for most of the detractors success in complaining about efficiency.  A breakthrough to commercial scale would soon flow across the developed word affecting practically every type of fluid handling in production over time.

The University of Minnesota success is a bigger deal than first glance would suggest.  Just consider the value in separating the main products of oil without heating to hundreds of degrees or producing alcohols without heating for the distillation.  The process effects are considerable too; a filtration step substituted for distillation could make continuous flow more practical than batches.  The impacts are not fully known, but projection suggests a far-reaching impact.

It’s a big group at Minnesota, members of the research team include Ph.D. candidates Kumar Varoon and Xueyi Zhang; postdoctoral fellows Bahman Elyassi and Cgun-Yi Sung; former students and Ph.D. graduates Damien Brewer, Sandeep Kumar, J. Alex Lee and Sudeep Maheshwari, graduate student Anudha Mittal; former undergraduate student Melissa Gettel; and faculty members Matteo Cococcioni, Lorraine Francis, Alon McCormick, K. Andre Mkhoyan and Michael Tsapatsis.

The research is backed by the United States Department of Energy (including the Carbon Sequestration Program and the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation — An Energy Frontier Center), the National Science Foundation and a variety of University of Minnesota partners.

Step one is finally here, thanks to the folks noted above.

2010 saw China restrict the export of neodymium, which is used in wind generators and motors. The move was said to direct the supplies to toward a massive wind generation project within China.  What happened was a two-tiered price for neodymium formed, one inside China and another, higher price, for the rest of the world.

Dr. Gawen Jenkin, of the Department of Geology, University of Leicester, and the lead convenor of the Fermor Meeting of the Geological Society of London that met to discuss this issue is reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, highlighting the dangers in the inexorable surge in demand for metals.

Dr Jenkin said: “Mobile phones contain copper, nickel, silver and zinc, aluminum, gold, lead, manganese, palladium, platinum and tin. More than a billion people will buy a mobile in a year — so that’s quite a lot of metal. And then there’s the neodymium in your laptop, the iron in your car, the aluminum in that soft drinks can — the list goes on…”

Jenkin continues, “With ever-greater use of these metals, are we running out? That was one of the questions we addressed at our meeting. It is reassuring that there’s no immediate danger of ‘peak metal’ as there’s quite a lot in the ground, still — but there will be shortages and bottlenecks of some metals like indium due to increased demand. That means that exploration for metal commodities is now a key skill. It’s never been a better time to become an economic geologist, working with a mining company. It’s one of the better-kept secrets of employment in a recession-hit world.”

There’s a “can’t be missed” clue on education and employment prospects.  “And a key factor in turning young people away from the large mining companies — their reputation for environmental unfriendliness — is being turned around as they make ever-greater efforts to integrate with local communities for their mutual benefit,” said Jenkin.

Among the basics that need to be grasped to understand the current state of affairs are how rare many metals, minerals and elements really are. Some are plentiful, but only found in rare places or are difficult to extract. Indium, for instance, is a byproduct of zinc mining and extraction.

Economics professor Roderick Eggert of the Colorado School of Mines explains at the U.S. Geological Survey meeting indium is not economically viable to extract unless zinc is being sought in the same ore.  Others are just plain scarce, like rhenium and tellurium, which only exist in very small amounts in Earth’s crust.

There are two fundamental responses to this kind of situation: use less of these minerals or improve the extraction of them from other ores in other parts of the world. The improved extraction methods seem to be where most people are heading.

Kathleen Benedetto of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Committee on Natural Resources, U.S. House of Representatives explains the Congress’ position for now by saying in a report abstract, “China’s efforts to restrict exports of mineral commodities garnered the attention of Congress and highlighted the need for the United States to assess the state of the Nation’s mineral policies and examine opportunities to produce rare earths and other strategic and critical minerals domestically. Nine bills have been introduced in the House and Senate to address supply disruptions of rare earths and other important mineral commodities.”

Another prominent session presenter Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey adds in her report abstract, “Deposits of rare earth elements and other critical minerals occur throughout the Nation.”  That information puts the current events in the larger historical perspective of mineral resource management, which has been the U.S. Geological Survey’s job for more than 130 years.  McNutt points out something interested citizens should be aware of, “The definition of ‘a critical mineral or material’ is extremely time dependent, as advances in materials science yield new products and the adoption of new technologies result in shifts in both supply and demand.”

The geopolitical implications of critical minerals have started bringing together scientists, economists and policy makers.  Monday Oct 10th saw the professors presenting their research alongside high-level representatives from the U.S. Congress and Senate, the Office of the President of the U.S., the U.S. Geological Survey, in a session at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis.

Those metals, rare earth minerals and elements are basic building materials for much of what makes energy efficiency, a growing economy, lots of employment and affordable technology possible.  Its good to see some action, if it’s only talking for now.  At least the people who should be keeping the system working are sensing the forthcoming problem.

Less friction equals less power needing less fuel. The plowshares coated with diamond-like carbon slide through the soil “like a hot knife through butter”.  As a result, the tractors pulling them need less power and fuel. In some tests the power required has been reduced by more than 30 percent.  This is a significant reduction: across farming and construction worldwide it would really add up.

Diamond Like Coating On Soil Tool. Click image for more info.

Extremely hard, diamond-like carbon coatings are already being used to protect hard disks in computers and ensure that sliding bearings remain smooth.

Fraunhofer, using German agriculture as an example, anticipates that in the future they could help farmers to save fuel while plowing and make it easier to till the ground. Farmers in Germany consume nearly a billion liters of fuel every year to work their land. Around 50 percent of the energy used when plowing or harrowing is consumed as a result of friction between the plowshare and the soil.

Fraunhofer scientists have already been able to reduce friction by half. The power required by the tractor has also been reduced, by more than 30 per cent in some tests.

For farmers a smoothly cutting soil tool means either a time gain because they can use wider equipment covering more area or lower costs for fuel, machinery and maintenance. The tractors can be smaller or can operate in partial load, with longer repair and maintenance intervals.

Physicist and trained fruit farmer Martin Hörner from Fraunhofer IWM explains, “From the environmental point of view it would be better for the tractors to be smaller.” They would not only need less fuel but would also be lighter. Lighter machines mean less soil compaction, and the looser the soil; the less power is needed to work it.

The quality of the soil would also be better. In highly compacted ground there are hardly any worms and other small creatures, which help to turn the soil and enrich it with nutrients. Compacted soils are less able to absorb water and dry out more quickly. “In Germany we are relatively advanced as far as protecting soil resources is concerned, but even in this country more soil is lost by compaction and erosion than is created by natural processes,” explains Hörner.

The loss of quality soil is a serious worldwide problem.

A further advantage of DLC coatings on soil working and tillage equipment is the protection they provide against corrosion and wear. Soil tools have to be hard and sturdy but also resilient, so that they do not break if they hit a rock. High-durability steels are used, but they suffer visibly if they are used for a prolonged length of time in the soil.

“A blade on a circular harrow can lose 50 per cent of its mass through wear every season,” states Hörner. Soil, sand and stones wear down conventional coatings within a very short time. That explains why soil tools have not been coated up to now.

The new DLC coatings, however, can withstand the extreme stresses and strains. The problem remaining is that the tough steel foundation of soil tool equipment deforms too easily and is therefore unsuitable as a substrate for the much more rigid diamond-like coating – it would quickly spall.

So the project partners are testing soil tools made of different materials, including nitriding steel, glass-fiber-reinforced plastic and tungsten carbide out in the field. The next project goal is to plow at least 20 kilometers of ground before the coating fails. “If we achieve that, wear-free soil tools will be within touching distance,” asserts Hörner.

Your humble writer isn’t familiar with the farming conditions in Germany.  Across the planet soil will have basalt, granite and other very hard sands, clays, loams and rocks.  The abrasives in soils are going to present quite a problem.  Farming in the U.S., essentially fully mechanized, operates at ground speeds of 4 to 7 miler per hour.

That puts the 20 kilometer stage at about two hours of operating time.  This won’t be enough, by more than an order of magnitude.  A 10-hour working day could be 50 or 60 miles or about 100 kilometers.

The DLC looks like a great development.  The research is at the lab stage with impressive results.  Going commercial is going to require the coating to stay on the tool far longer than the scientists seem to expect.  Food production is very timing sensitive for planting, nurture and harvesting.  Switching out tools several times a day won’t work.

But get that coating to last, save gallons of diesel per hour, and the fuel cost for food and biofuel production could plummet.  It’s worth the work.  Lets hope the team stays on course and brings the market a low cost highly efficient soil tool solution soon.  Hörner’s contact info is on the Fraunhofer press page.

University of Illinois researchers have demonstrated the first optoelectronically active 3-D photonic crystal, an advance that could open new avenues for solar cells, lasers, metamaterials and much more.

Paul Braun, a professor of materials science and engineering and of chemistry who led the research effort said, “We’ve discovered a way to change the three-dimensional structure of a well-established semiconductor material to enable new optical properties while maintaining its very attractive electrical properties.”

3D Semiconductor Method. Click image for more info.

Due to their unique physical structures photonic crystal materials can control or manipulate light in unexpected ways.  Photonic crystals can induce unusual phenomena and affect photon behavior in ways that traditional optical materials and devices can’t. They are popular materials of study for applications in lasers, solar energy, LEDs, metamaterials, etc.

Professor Braun’s team built photonic crystal has both optic and electric properties.  The journal Nature Materials published the team’s study paper online line this past weekend.

Erik Nelson, a former graduate student in Braun’s lab who now is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University said, “With our approach to fabricating photonic crystals, there’s a lot of potential to optimize electronic and optical properties simultaneously. It gives you the opportunity to control light in ways that are very unique to control the way it’s emitted and absorbed or how it propagates.”

The build process seems quite easy, even though technically challenging, there is some existing commercial activity to build and grow from.

To create a 3-D photonic crystal that is both electronically and optically active, the researchers started with a template of tiny spheres packed together. Then, they deposit gallium arsenide (GaAs), a widely used semiconductor, through the template, filling in the gaps between the spheres.  The GaAs grows as a single crystal from the bottom up, a process called epitaxy. Epitaxy is common in industry to create flat, two-dimensional films of single-crystal semiconductors, but Braun’s group developed a way to apply it to an intricate three-dimensional structure.

Braun, who also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and with the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at Illinois explains, “The key discovery here was that we grew single-crystal semiconductor through this complex template. Gallium arsenide wants to grow as a film on the substrate from the bottom up, but it runs into the template and goes around it. It’s almost as though the template is filling up with water. As long as you keep growing GaAs, it keeps filling the template from the bottom up until you reach the top surface.”

The epitaxial approach eliminates many of the defects introduced by top-down fabrication methods, a popular pathway for creating 3-D photonic structures. Another advantage is the ease of creating layered heterostructures. For example, a quantum well layer could be introduced into the photonic crystal by partially filling the template with GaAs and then briefly switching the vapor stream to another material.

Once the template is filled, the researchers remove the spheres, leaving a complex, porous 3-D structure of single-crystal semiconductor. Then they coat the entire structure with a very thin layer of a semiconductor with a wider bandgap to improve performance and prevent surface recombination.

3D Photonic Crystal LED. Click image for more info.

For a test of the technique the group built a 3-D photonic crystal LED.  This is the first such working device.  The team deserves congratulations on an innovation brought to a working lab unit.

Braun’s group is now working to optimize the structure for specific applications. The new LED demonstrates that the concept produces functional devices, but by tweaking the structure or using other semiconductor materials, researchers can improve solar collection or target specific wavelengths for metamaterials applications or low-threshold lasers.

“From this point on, it’s a matter of changing the device geometry to achieve whatever properties you want,” Nelson said. It really opens up a whole new area of research into extremely efficient or novel energy devices.

How far this can go is anyone’s guess for now.  Stacking up a semiconductor in 3-D form such it will operate both optically and electrically shifts the whole field of light and energy both at harvest and at use.  The prime questions to come are how much cost and how efficient?  The answers may prove quite interesting in a field that has just now opened up.

The Risø DTU press release, first reported in the U.S by Brian Wang at NextBigFuture notes super strong nanometals are beginning to play an important role in making cars even lighter, enabling them to withstand collisions without fatal consequences for the passengers. Today, the chassis and body of an ordinary automobile consists of something on the order of 193 different types of steel. The steel for each part of the car has been carefully selected and optimized. It is important, for example, that all parts are as light as possible because of the fuel consumption, whereas other parts of the car have to be super strong in order to protect passengers in a collision.

Super strong nanostructured metals are now entering the scene, aimed at making cars even lighter, enabling them to withstand collisions in a better way without fatal consequences for the passengers.

Crystal Lattice Example. Click image for more info.

Yu’s research task was to determine the stability in new nanostructured metals, which are indeed very strong, but also tend to become softer, even at low temperatures. This is due to the fact that microscopic metal grains of nanostructured metals are not stable – a problem that Yu’s discovery now offers an explanation.

The press release explains that a fine structure consists of many small metal grains. The boundaries between these metal grains can move, also at room temperature. At the same time a coarsening of the structure takes place and the strength of the nanometal is consequently weakened. Yu has now shown that the boundaries of the grains can be locked, when small particles are present and that the solution is technologically feasible. The work explains a manufacturing process for car components to be made of nanometals.

The press release sidebar explains further.  Nanometals contain very small metal grains – from 10 to 1,000 nanometers. One nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter. The smaller the metal grains become, the stronger the metal becomes. The metal becomes twice as strong, for example, if the individual metal grains are made four times smaller. That is why materials scientists work to reduce the size of the individual metal grains. In steel and aluminum, the particles have been reduced to below 1 micrometer, which is one thousandth of a millimeter. There is a great interest in nanometals and research is conducted worldwide. Nanometals are super strong and their super strength can be combined with other desired properties, too.

Nanostructured metals have been known for many years, but now they have become the subject of scientists’ renewed and strong interest.  Current production examples are the thin steel wires used in grand pianos, for strengthening truck tires and specialized containers, which have to withstand an extremely high pressure.

Ms. Dorte Juul Jensen, head of Materials Research Division is happy that the excellent findings also have practical applications, “We are cooperating with a Danish company and also a Danish consulting engineering company with the purpose of developing light and strong aluminum materials with a view to their application in light vehicles where especially deformation at high rate as in a collision is the focus. The new findings will be included in this work.”

Scientists are not only interested in the size of the metal grains. The interfaces between the individual metal grains are also important to a number of properties. A special type of grain boundaries, so-called twin boundaries, provides both strength and good electrical conductivity. When that research becomes commercial for producing thinner wires, material consumption and weight will be reduced and an installation will become easier.

Expect smaller, lighter, stronger aluminum and steel, the existing prime materials across a vast array of products that will become much more efficient, safer and less bulky.  All are key aspects to a more energy efficient future.

University of Toronto (UT) researchers examining the photosynthetic apparatus in plants have been inspired to devise and engineer a new generation of nanomaterials that control and direct the energy absorbed from light.  The UT team has built antennas of nanomaterials that control and direct the energy absorbed from light.

UT researchers Professors Shana Kelley and Ted Sargent, report the construction of what they term “artificial molecules” of quantum dots in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Kelly explains, “Nanotechnologists have for many years been captivated by quantum dots – particles of semiconductor that can absorb and emit light efficiently, and at custom-chosen wavelengths. What the (research) community has lacked – until now – is a strategy to build higher-order structures, or complexes, out of multiple different types of quantum dots. This discovery fills that gap.” Kelly’s UT credentials are impressive, Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, the Department of Biochemistry in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Department of Chemistry in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

The team Kelly and Sargent are leading has combined its expertise in DNA and in semiconductors to invent a generalized strategy to bind certain classes of nanoparticles to one another.

Sargent, another impressive UT person, occupies the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology, is a professor in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UT.  The team effort is another excellent example of cross-field innovation.  Sargent takes up the explanation saying, “The credit for this remarkable result actually goes to DNA: its high degree of specificity – its willingness to bind only to a complementary sequence – enabled us to build rationally-engineered, designer structures out of nanomaterials.  The amazing thing is that our antennas built themselves — we coated different classes of nanoparticles with selected sequences of DNA, combined the different families in one beaker, and nature took its course. The result is a beautiful new set of self-assembled materials with exciting properties.”

Quantum Dot Assemblies. Click Image for more info.

A conventional antenna ‘increases’ the amount of an electromagnetic wave, such as a radio or TV frequency that is absorbed, and then funnels that energy to a circuit. The UT nanoantennas operate similarly by increasing the amount of light that is absorbed and funneling it to a single site within their molecule-like complexes. This would be an important means to increase the net energy collected.

This concept is already used in nature with light harvesting “antennas” the constituent parts of leaves that make photosynthesis efficient.

Sargent explains, “Like the antennas in radios and mobile phones, our (quantum dot) complexes captured dispersed energy and concentrated it to a desired location. Like the light harvesting antennas in the leaves of a tree, our complexes do so using wavelengths found in sunlight.”

The Dean of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy Professor Henry Mann, kicks in justifiably proudly, “Professors Kelley and Sargent have invented a novel class of materials with entirely new properties. Their insight and innovative research demonstrates why the University of Toronto leads in the field of nanotechnology,”

Others might take a little competitive issue with that, but UT is first with an impressive concept in working lab form.  The UT press release note a competitors comment that back up the gravity of the threshold the UT team has crossed.

Paul S. Weiss, Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences at UCLA and Director of the California NanoSystems Institute is quoted saying, “This is a terrific piece of work that demonstrates our growing ability to assemble precise structures, to tailor their properties, and to build in the capability to control these properties using external stimuli.”

The story is just getting going.  Professor Kelly notes the concept discussed in the published paper goes beyond light antennas alone saying, “What this work shows is that our capacity to manipulate materials at the nanoscale is limited only by human imagination. If semiconductor quantum dots are artificial atoms, then we have rationally synthesized artificial molecules from these versatile building blocks.”

Along with the matters of getting further than the lab to larger scale and understanding what the costs might be there is the directions yet to be followed by other researchers and the innovation and new connections to other technology.  Quantum dots are so new, so basic that the potential is still a frontier.  But science is now an important step in and that step promotes many, many more going who knows where.  This is great news.

Heads up for headhunters, other team members are Sjoerd Hoogland and Armin Fischer of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Grigory Tikhomirov and P. E. Lee of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.

Pacific Undersea Rare Earth Element Deposits. Click image for the largest view.

First one asks is that kind of deposit possible to gather and how deep? Kato notes the mineral resources are distributed 3,500 to 6,000 meters below the surface of the sea, it is possible to mine and collect more than 40 million tons of rare earth-rich mud every year with existing technologies. Plus, the rare elements can be extracted from the collected mud in a short time by using, for example, dilute sulfuric acid.

And Japan is out in front on the legal access matter.  The deposits are out in the high seas, but it is possible for Japan to obtain mining areas if it meets some conditions such as an agreement with the International Seabed Authority.  This is doable.  Maybe the Chinese idea of an embargo isn’t turning out to be the best marketing idea after all.

Kato’s research group took over 27 piston core samples that the Ocean Research Institute of the University of Tokyo had collected across the Pacific Ocean for paleomagnetic research from 1968 to 1984. Piston core samples are pillar-shaped sediment samples obtained from seabeds by dropping 5 to 20 meter long metal cylinders called piston corers, from ships. By using this method, it becomes possible to collect sediments without cluttering them while keeping the order of the layers. The researchers started to analyze the whole-rock chemical compositions of 456 types of samples by using an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer in 2008.

They found the rare earth-rich mud with quality equivalent to that of the ion adsorptive ore deposit in southern China.  The effective territory covers a wide area of the Pacific Ocean. Ion adsorptive ore deposits are formed when rare earths are adsorbed by clay minerals concentrate on soil made of weathered granite.

It has been thought this level of deposits was found only in southern China such as Jiangxi and Hunan provinces. The ocean deposits also contain large amounts of heavy rare earths including dysprosium and terbium, and most of these rare earths can be extracted just by using dilute acid to leach them out.

The statistical analysis shows rare earth-rich mud with an average thickness of 8.0 meters and an average gross rare earth density of 1,054 parts per million in the southeastern Pacific Ocean and the mud in the central Pacific Ocean with an average thickness of 23.6 meters and an average gross rare earth density of 625 parts per million.

Kato notes if rare earth-rich mud is harvested in a 4 km2 (1.2 mile sided square) area at a depth of 10 meters such as at “Site 76,” which is located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, it would potentially provide the amount of rare earths equivalent to the amount consumed in Japan in one or two years.

There are other valuable minerals in the mud, too.  Site 76 contains concentrated amounts of rare metals such as vanadium, cobalt, nickel and molybdenum.

Kato describes the rare earth-rich mud as “dream-like offshore mineral resource.” The thesis about those findings was published in an online issue of Nature Geoscience magazine.

The analysis shows rich deposits, the resource is huge and there are only tiny amounts of problematic radioactive elements like uranium and thorium.

The issue may be can the Japanese industrials get a project going.  Kato’s group isn’t saying what the cost projections might be; perhaps the skill set to figure it isn’t in the group.  But there are likely number crunchers looking into the idea as you read this.  The Japanese and suppliers world wide, every consumer of sophisticated products and even the U.S. Congress noted the embargo China used last year.

If anyone can get the minerals up at low cost it will be the Japanese. Cooperation with the resources in Korea may come into the matter, too.  Between them or going it alone there is little doubt if the numbers work some means of harvesting rare earth elements is going to come to market.  A sure point is if it does – it will be at substantial scale.

A year ago there was concern about adequate rare earth element supplies to keep industries outside of China going.  Now it’s looking more like a race to fill the gap until the new mines and new ocean deposits can get to market.  The worry isn’t over, but the concerns have changed.