research News

Development of a theoretical basis for ultrahigh piezoelectricity in ferroelectric materials led to a new material with twice the piezo response of any existing commercial ferroelectric ceramics, according to an international team of researchers from Penn State, China and Australia.

Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Purnendu Chatterjee Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will discuss “Electric Field Control of Magnetism” during the 2018 Nelson W. Taylor Lecture Series in Materials Science and Engineering, held on Thursday, April 5.

Lightning and volcanos both produce glass, and humans have been making glass from silicon dioxide since prehistory. Industrialization brought us boron-based glasses, polymer glasses and metallic glasses, but now an international team of researchers has developed a new family of glass based on metals and organic compounds that stacks up to the original silica in glass-forming ability.

Steidle Building added another honor to its arsenal after the Master Builders’ Association (MBA) of Western Pennsylvania awarded it a 2017 Building Excellence Award in the category of Renovation Construction over $10 million.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Glass researcher John Mauro’s plane had just touched down stateside from an intercontinental flight from Japan when he suddenly realized the broad impact of his work.

Crespi and Wang had the idea that by manipulating the underlying substrate, they could predetermine where the grain boundaries would begin and end, and make them line up in orderly positions. The key shapes were based on something called Gaussian curvature, a series of hemispherical bumps and dips on a substrate that resembles an egg carton.

A new, lightweight composite material for energy storage in flexible electronics, electric vehicles and aerospace applications has been experimentally shown to store energy at operating temperatures well above current commercial polymers, according to a team of Penn State scientists. This polymer-based, ultrathin material can be produced using techniques already used in industry.