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It’s estimated that more than half of U.S. energy — from vehicles and heavy equipment, for instance — is wasted as heat. Mostly, this waste heat simply escapes into the air. But that’s beginning to...
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MIT engineers have fabricated a new elastic material coated with microscopic, hairlike structures that tilt in response to a magnetic field. Depending on the field’s orientation, the microhairs can...
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Researchers at MIT and in Saudi Arabia have developed a new way of making surfaces that can actively control how fluids or particles move across them. The work might enable new kinds of biomedical or...
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The magnets cluttering the face of your refrigerator may one day be used as cooling agents, according to a new theory formulated by MIT researchers.
The theory describes the motion of magnons — quasi...
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A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun.
The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure...
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Last year, MIT researchers discovered that when water droplets spontaneously jump away from superhydrophobic surfaces during condensation, they can gain electric charge in the process. Now, the same...
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Whenever there is a major spill of oil into water, the two tend to mix into a suspension of tiny droplets, called an emulsion, that is extremely hard to separate — and that can cause severe damage to...
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Sami Khan, a dual-degree graduate student in mechanical engineering and technology and policy, recently received a research award from the Hydro Research Foundation. Khan — who conducts research in...
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Explosions caused by leaking gas pipes under city streets have frequently made headlines in recent years, including one that leveled an apartment building in New York this spring. But while the...
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The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) recently presented three researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering — C. Justin Kamp, Alex G. Sappok, and Victor W. Wong — with the 2014 Arch T...
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You can quickly run out of fingers and toes counting the many ways we waste energy. Take our sewage systems, for example: The energetic content of wastewater is about 10 times the amount of energy it...
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Vast amounts of excess heat are generated by industrial processes and by electric power plants; researchers around the world have spent decades seeking ways to harness some of this wasted energy....
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Alexander Slocum, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Precision Engineering Group, teaches and conducts research in the area of precision machine design. Precision...
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Materials that can be used for thermoelectric devices — those that turn a temperature difference into an electric voltage — have been known for decades. But until now there has been no good...
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Making Silicon Devices Responsive to Infrared Light
Photo Credit: Dr. Mark Winkler
by David Chandler, MIT News Office
Researchers have tried a variety of methods to develop detectors that are...
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Lithium-air batteries have become a hot research area in recent years: They hold the promise of drastically increasing power per battery weight, which could lead, for example, to electric cars with a...
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In a completely unexpected finding, MIT researchers have discovered that tiny water droplets that form on a superhydrophobic surface, and then “jump” away from that surface, carry an electric charge...
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Steam condensation is key to the worldwide production of electricity and clean water: It is part of the power cycle that drives 85 percent of all electricity-generating plants and about half of all...
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MIT researchers have found a new family of materials that provides the best-ever performance in a reaction called oxygen evolution, a key requirement for energy storage and delivery systems such as...
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Efficiency Innovation for Water Purification
From left to right: Karim Chehayeb, Gregory Thiel, Steven Lam, Prakash Narayan Govindan, Max St. John, Ronan McGovern,and Professor John Lienhard...