LAB REPORT

Researchers at Liverpool University in the U.K. have created a material that, they say, has the worst heat transfer of virtually any solid material humans have ever grasped. If that sounds like a strange direction to go down, it isn’t — a material that’s a terrible heat conductor could make a superb insulator, and materials like it could play a key role in bringing the world to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Because of inefficiencies — bad usage, losses in the electrical grid and heat being conducted away — analysts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory estimate that a staggering two-thirds of U.S. energy generation never actually reaches its end purpose.

So, scientists say, there’s good reason to keep researching materials like these. Making better insulation and better materials could heavily cut back on energy use, and go a long way toward reducing the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.

How much, exactly, will the Earth warm in response to future greenhouse gas emissions? The answer, scientists say, lies in the sky above our heads. Clouds are the unlikely gatekeepers of climate change — they play a critical role in how quickly the world warms.

Clouds sometimes have a warming effect on the local climate and sometimes a cooling effect — it all depends on the type of cloud, the local climate and a variety of other conditions. Global warming is expected to increase certain types of clouds in certain places and decrease them in others. All in all, it’s a big, complex patchwork of effects all over the globe.

LLNL climate scientist Mark Zelinka said it’s reassuring that different strategies in modeling and machine learning have arrived at similar conclusions.

“If it was just one study, you might question the robustness of that result,” Zelinka said. “But if you’ve got more and more evidence from independent authors using independent techniques, and they’re all reaching a similar conclusion, that’s pretty powerful.”

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using 3D printing to produce flow-through electrodes (FTEs) for electrochemical reactors.

Using direct ink writing, the LLNL team was able to 3D print customized porous electrodes made from graphene aerogels. The printed structures are crucial for a whole host of electrochemical reactions, such as the conversion of CO2 and other molecules into useful energy products.

By leveraging the design freedom offered by additive manufacturing, the researchers found that they could better control the flow passing through their 3D printed FTEs (porous electrodes responsible for the reactions in the reactors). In the context of an electrochemical reactor, this can mean improving mass transfer and maximizing reactor performance.

Czech Academy of Sciences researchers have created a transient version of metallic water — something that has been predicted to exist only under the crushing pressure inside giant planets and stars — at very low pressure by doping it with electrons from a liquid alloy.

At intense pressures, water could become metallic as its electronic orbitals are literally crushed together. Such metallization may help explain the magnetic fields of planets like Uranus and Neptune. But creating it on Earth has so far been impossible as it requires pressures currently inaccessible in the laboratory.

Physicist Marius Millot of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose laser shock compression experiments provided evidence for superionic ice on Neptune and Uranus, is impressed. "It’s really cool," he said. “I would have never thought that such an experiment was even possible…I had to read one caption three times to check that it was really lasting seconds. In our dynamic compression experiments, you usually do nanosecond-timescale experiments or, if it’s really long-lived, maybe it’s a microsecond.”

While Millot agrees that the doped state provides no direct information about the predicted high-pressure metallic ice, he adds: “Because the sample lasts for seconds…maybe we should shock compress it with a laser and see what sort of weird state we can create.”

Lawrence Livermore scientists have experimentally tested the predictions of a 2020 study that computationally investigated the effect of melting on shock driven metal microjets. That earlier work predicted that melting the base material does not necessarily lead to a substantial increase in jet mass.

The LLNL team confirmed the predictions of microjet behavior with liquid and solid tin microjet experiments. The work, led by LLNL scientist David Bober, is featured in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Bober said microjets are important to study because they are examples of broader jetting and ejecta processes that occur throughout condensed matter shock physics, meaning anything from explosives to asteroid impact.