Barocaloric (BC) materials provide cheaper and more energy efficient alternatives to traditional refrigerants. Some liquid alkanes were recently shown to exhibit a colossal BC effect, matching the entropy changes in commercial vapour-liquid refrigerants. D ...
Piezoelectrics play a significant role in modern electronics and electric devices. Thermal or mechanical stress on such materials induces a change in polarization generating an electric response, which is the sole effect of why they are so interesting. How ...
Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) enable the realization of energy-efficient and compact actuator systems. DEAs operate at the kilovolt range with typically microampere-level currents and hence minimize thermal losses in comparison to low voltage/high ...
The development of fully solution-processed, biodegradable piezoelectrics is a critical step in the development of green electronics towards the worldwide reduction of harmful electronic waste. However, recent printing processes for piezoelectrics are hind ...
Observing the fast dynamics of nanoscale systems is crucial in order to understand and ultimately control their behavior. Characterizing these dynamic processes requires techniques with atomic spatial resolution and a temporal resolution that matches the t ...
Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) generate motion resembling natural muscles in reliability, adaptability, elongation, and frequency of operation. They are highly attractive in implantable soft robots or artificial organs. However, many applications of ...
Structure determination of materials is key to understanding their physical properties. While single-crystal X-ray diffraction is the gold standard for structures displaying long-range order, many materials of interest are polycrystalline and/or disordered ...
Microcapsules are appealing containers for delivering active ingredients, such as drugs and cosmetics, or conducting chemical and biological reactions on a small scale. To control the timing and location of release of these encapsulants, the shells of micr ...
The subject of the present work is discovery and in-depth characterization of a new class of functional materials. Tuning of the bond polarity and orbital occupation with a goal of establishing balance between localization and delocalization of electrons - ...
We mine from the literature experimental data on the CO2 electrochemical reduction selectivity of Cu single crystal surfaces. We then probe the accuracy of a machine learning model trained to predict faradaic efficiencies for 11 CO2 reduction reaction prod ...
Dielectric elastomer transducers are elastic capacitors that respond to mechanical or electrical stress. They can be used in applications such as millimeter-sized soft robots and harvesters of the energy contained in ocean waves. The dielectric component o ...