BWX Technologies [BWXT] has agreed to acquire a specialty materials and manufacturing business from L3Harris Technologies ’ [LHX] Aerojet Rocketdyne segment for $100 million. The Aerojet Ordnance Tennessee, Inc. (AOT) […]

JALT (The Annual International Conference of the Japan Association for Language Teaching). November 18 (Mon), 9:00-16:00 in Shizuoka. Call for proposals ends March 10th, 2024.

JALT (The Annual International Conference of the Japan Association for Language Teaching). November 17 (Sun), 9:00-19:00 in Shizuoka. Call for proposals ends March 10th, 2024.

JALT (The Annual International Conference of the Japan Association for Language Teaching). November 16 (Sat), 9:00-19:00 in Shizuoka. Call for proposals ends March 10th, 2024.

Chile recently passed a law that will ban all single-use plastic in several fields. The industry has been searching for materials that are non-plastic but that still have all the characteristics of plastic.

ecoCombo™ compliments Rohrer’s ezCombo™ program and offers a new way for retail brands to make sustainable packaging choices in their blister packaging.

In addition to offering their entire fleet of available blister packaging systems ready to run these challenging films, the company will offer upgrades for installed Pharmaworks blister machines in the field and can rebuild blister machines from other suppliers to handle these new sustainable films.

Bubble cushioning, inflatable air pillows and bubble mailers supplied by Sealed Air all include recycled content.

Smart packaging is developing rapidly. A major factor driving the growth of the smart packaging market is increasing demand for packaging that indicates and maintains product quality throughout the supply chain.

 The latest addition is the HERMA PP white light (grade 884) plastic film in combination with the special film adhesive 62Xpc.

The material provides adhesion in a cool, damp environment and can be washed off again at a later stage without leaving any residue.

The dairy product manufacturer’s ambitious sustainability goals include making packaging 100% recyclable and closing material loops by 2027.

The maker of all-natural dog treats transitioned from plastic to paper-based shipping and packing materials.

New tenant requirement sets foodservice-ware standards that aim to reduce waste.

By offering consumers the option to reuse the packaging, the company addresses the urgent issue of plastic pollution in the United States while providing convenient storage solutions.

We bring you the highlights nanoscale science and technology research in 2017 from IOP Publishing's materials portfolio.

If we eliminate the obvious, the fact that the belts and motors can pinch a finger as well as a heater block operating at 200+c will definitely burn you, we are left with the one unknown. That is of any hazardous fumes and odors that may be emitted by heating

UCD's Prof Kate Robson Brown leads the development of analytical models that predict the lifetime of composites in low-Earth orbit.

Read more: UCD professor part of team developing new space materials

Roofing contractors sought alternatives during a spate of challenges, a pandemic followed by supply chain disruptions and capped by a spike in inflation. But was it at a price?

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory examined three different types of roofing strategies and their impact on near-surface temperature and cooling energy demand.

NanoTech Materials has partnered with Tesson Roofing to form a joint venture called Cool Roof Coating Systems LLC, which plans to combat Arizona's summer heat.

NanoTech Materials, Inc. announced a move to a new 42,000-square-foot Houston-area facility, marking a milestone in expanding its Cool Roof Coat production to meet high demand.

Learn about some of the top concerns with deliveries on construction projects and how to train drivers to stay safe

Mycocycle, the biotechnology company using fungi to transform construction debris into reusable materials, received a new round of funding that will help it further scale its waste-to-value chain.

The August producer price index report showed stable construction materials prices, with slight declines in wood and steel products, while power wire and cable prices surged, but overall, construction materials prices have been relatively steady in 2023.

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Engineering Library- TA403.M246 2016

Location: Engineering Library- TS183.M38 2016

Location: Engineering Library- TS171.4.J34 2016

Location: Engineering Library- TA418.9.N35 2016

Location: Engineering Library- R857.P6P599 2016

Location: Engineering Library- TD430.S536 2016

Location: Engineering Library- TA481.5.A38 2016

Location: Engineering Library- TA409.L346 2016

Thirty-six boxes of 17th century archaeological material have returned to Bermuda after study at William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. A spokesperson said, “The returned materials include archaeological finds and records relating to the First Forts Project, undertaken between 1993 and 2003 by the Department of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary and the […]

According to the U.N. Environmental Program, the construction industry is not making enough efforts to achieve net-zero emissions. While all sectors are making efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the construction sector is still to get an organized strategy. Today, up to 50% of the world's climate change is caused by the construction sector. The same industry is responsible for up to 40% of the pollution in water bodies. These figures just go to show, how significant the construction industry is in regards to environmental impact.[...]

See how geometric designs are inspiring new ways to make stretchy materials. (Video by Ahmad Rafsanjani and Damiano Pasini/McGill University)

MatWeb's new export engine pipes data from its 47,000 material information sheetsdirectly into SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks

Strange solids called temporal metamaterials finally make it possible to investigate the controversial idea of quantum friction – and push special relativity to its limits

A super-stretchy hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original length and return to its initial shape, and could be used to make soft inflatable robots

Strange solids called temporal metamaterials finally make it possible to investigate the controversial idea of quantum friction – and push special relativity to its limits

A prefilled syringe (PFS) should be able to be adequately and consistently extruded during injection for optimal safe drug delivery and accurate dosing. To facilitate appropriate break-loose and gliding forces (BLGFs) required during injection, certain primary packaging materials (PPMs) such as the syringe barrel and plunger are usually coated with silicone oil, which acts as a lubricant. Due to its direct contact with drug, silicone oil can increase the number of particles in the syringe, which could lead to adverse interactions. Compliance with regulatory-defined silicone oil quantities in certain drug products, such as ophthalmics, presents a trade-off with the necessity for desirable low and consistent BLGF. In addition to its siliconization, the dimensional accuracy of the PPM has an important role in controlling the BLGF. The dimensions of the PPM are individualized depending on the product and its design and have certain tolerances that must be met during manufacturing. Most studies on ophthalmics focused on the adverse interactions between silicone oil and the drug. To the authors' knowledge, there have been no public studies so far that have investigated the impact of the dimensional variability of the PPM on the BLGF in ophthalmic PFSs. In this study, we applied advanced optical shaft and tactile measuring technologies to investigate this impact. The syringes investigated were first sampled during aseptic production and tested for the BLGF. Subsequently, defined dimensions of the PPM were measured individually. The results showed that the dimensional variability of the PPM can have a negative impact on the BLGF, despite their conformity to specifications, which indicates that the currently available market quality of PPMs is improvable for critical drug products such as ophthalmics. This study could serve as an approach to define product-specific requirements for primary packaging combinations and thus appropriate specifications based on data during the development stage of drug products.

Quantum computing is a devilishly complex technology, with many technical hurdles impacting its development. Of these challenges two critical issues stand out: miniaturization and qubit quality.

IBM has adopted the superconducting qubit road map of reaching a 1,121-qubit processor by 2023, leading to the expectation that 1,000 qubits with today’s qubit form factor is feasible. However, current approaches will require very large chips (50 millimeters on a side, or larger) at the scale of small wafers, or the use of chiplets on multichip modules. While this approach will work, the aim is to attain a better path toward scalability.

Now researchers at MIT have been able to both reduce the size of the qubits and done so in a way that reduces the interference that occurs between neighboring qubits. The MIT researchers have increased the number of superconducting qubits that can be added onto a device by a factor of 100.

“We are addressing both qubit miniaturization and quality,” said William Oliver, the director for the Center for Quantum Engineering at MIT. “Unlike conventional transistor scaling, where only the number really matters, for qubits, large numbers are not sufficient, they must also be high-performance. Sacrificing performance for qubit number is not a useful trade in quantum computing. They must go hand in hand.”

The key to this big increase in qubit density and reduction of interference comes down to the use of two-dimensional materials, in particular the 2D insulator hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). The MIT researchers demonstrated that a few atomic monolayers of hBN can be stacked to form the insulator in the capacitors of a superconducting qubit.

Just like other capacitors, the capacitors in these superconducting circuits take the form of a sandwich in which an insulator material is sandwiched between two metal plates. The big difference for these capacitors is that the superconducting circuits can operate only at extremely low temperatures—less than 0.02 degrees above absolute zero (-273.15 °C).

Superconducting qubits are measured at temperatures as low as 20 millikelvin in a dilution refrigerator.Nathan Fiske/MIT

In that environment, insulating materials that are available for the job, such as PE-CVD silicon oxide or silicon nitride, have quite a few defects that are too lossy for quantum computing applications. To get around these material shortcomings, most superconducting circuits use what are called coplanar capacitors. In these capacitors, the plates are positioned laterally to one another, rather than on top of one another.

As a result, the intrinsic silicon substrate below the plates and to a smaller degree the vacuum above the plates serve as the capacitor dielectric. Intrinsic silicon is chemically pure and therefore has few defects, and the large size dilutes the electric field at the plate interfaces, all of which leads to a low-loss capacitor. The lateral size of each plate in this open-face design ends up being quite large (typically 100 by 100 micrometers) in order to achieve the required capacitance.

In an effort to move away from the large lateral configuration, the MIT researchers embarked on a search for an insulator that has very few defects and is compatible with superconducting capacitor plates.

“We chose to study hBN because it is the most widely used insulator in 2D material research due to its cleanliness and chemical inertness,” said colead author Joel Wang, a research scientist in the Engineering Quantum Systems group of the MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics.

On either side of the hBN, the MIT researchers used the 2D superconducting material, niobium diselenide. One of the trickiest aspects of fabricating the capacitors was working with the niobium diselenide, which oxidizes in seconds when exposed to air, according to Wang. This necessitates that the assembly of the capacitor occur in a glove box filled with argon gas.

While this would seemingly complicate the scaling up of the production of these capacitors, Wang doesn’t regard this as a limiting factor.

“What determines the quality factor of the capacitor are the two interfaces between the two materials,” said Wang. “Once the sandwich is made, the two interfaces are “sealed” and we don’t see any noticeable degradation over time when exposed to the atmosphere.”

This lack of degradation is because around 90 percent of the electric field is contained within the sandwich structure, so the oxidation of the outer surface of the niobium diselenide does not play a significant role anymore. This ultimately makes the capacitor footprint much smaller, and it accounts for the reduction in cross talk between the neighboring qubits.

“The main challenge for scaling up the fabrication will be the wafer-scale growth of hBN and 2D superconductors like [niobium diselenide], and how one can do wafer-scale stacking of these films,” added Wang.

Wang believes that this research has shown 2D hBN to be a good insulator candidate for superconducting qubits. He says that the groundwork the MIT team has done will serve as a road map for using other hybrid 2D materials to build superconducting circuits.

If you’ve ever tried to make a portrait that looks like the person you’re sketching, you know it’s no walk in the park. Maybe you’ve got the eyes perfectly, but then the mouth looks… well, let’s say “abstract.” So, how do the pros do it? What tools, materials, and techniques help bring out that jaw-dropping […]

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