Hogweed, which has grown over vast territories of Russia, can be useful as a material for batteries. Scientists from NUST MISIS have investigated the possibilities of fibrous substances in the plant stems. They have turned them into electrodes — elements of devices capable of storing energy. It was experimentally proven that the treated dangerous plant can successfully replace traditional sources of energy without compromising the quality of the batteries.
Scientists from the National University of Science and Technology MISIS (Russia) together with their colleagues from Lulea University of Technology (Sweden) and Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) developed the world’s first thermoelectric material with ordered nanotubes. Due to the polymer nature, it is flexible, and the addition of nanotubes several times increases its electrical conductivity. In the future, this material can be used to charge mobile devices without an additional power source: one such bracelet or case would allow one to charge their watch or phone directly from the heat of the human body. An article about the development is published in Advanced Functional Materials.
Researchers from the National University of Science and Technology “MISIS” developed a database that will help create new grades of steels. This will to speed up the process of creating innovative steel grades with specified strength and ductility allow at least 10 times, which will allow manufacturing car bodies of the most complex shapes. Article on the research is published in “Calphad”.
Scientists from the National University of Science and Technology MISIS measured the number of trace impurities in the ingots of ancient lead from the sunken ship of the ancient Romans, using a novel technology. It was shown that lead, which stayed underwater for 1500 years, contains such a small amount of radioactive elements — Uranium and Thorim, that it can be used without any purification in one of the most “demanding” areas — Nuclear physics — in the study of elementary particles. The experiment on the selection and determination of micro-impurities was carried out in cooperation with colleagues from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and the National Center for Scientific Research (France). An article about the development published in the journal Talanta.
Scientists from NUST MISIS and IPCE RAS (Moscow, Russia) together with Italian colleagues from University of Rome Tor Vergata managed to significantly increase stability and effectiveness of perovskite elements — promising materials for solar energy — by adding a layer of copper iodide (CuI). The article on the research is published in “Materials”.
Aluminum is one of the most promising materials for aeronautics and automobile industry. Scientists from the National University of Science and Technology “MISIS” found a simple and efficient way of strengthening aluminum-based composite materials. Doping aluminum melt with nickel and lanthanum, scientists managed to create a material combining benefits of both composite materials and standard alloys: flexibility, strength, lightness. The article on the research is published in Materials Letters.
Scientists from the National University of Science and Technology “MISIS” together with their colleagues from Derzhavin Tambov State University and Saratov Chernyshevsky State University have figured out that graphene is capable of purifying water, making it drinkable, without further chlorination. “Capturing” bacterial cells, it forms flakes that can be easily extracted from the water. Graphene separated by ultrasound can be reused. The article on the research is published in Materials Science & Engineering C.
Researchers from the National University of science and technology MISIS (NUST MISIS, Moscow, Russia) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN, Naples, Italy) have developed a simple and cost-effective technology that allows increasing the speed of the automated microscopes (AM) by 10-100 times. The microscopes’ speed growth will help scientists in many fields: medicine, nuclear physics, astrophysics, neutrino physics, archeology, geology, volcanology, archeology. The development report was published in the Scientific Reports journal of the Nature publishing house.
“In our study, we tested the technology of fully automated optical scanning of thin samples, on which the new generation of automated microscopes will be based. We analyzed the performance and estimated the achievable scanning speed in comparison with traditional methods, — said one of the authors, a researcher from NUST MISIS and INFN Andrey Alexandrov.
Modern science requires the use of high-speed scanning systems, capable of conducting a high-precision analysis of the samples internal structure, of obtaining and analyzing large amounts of information. AM of the new generation are such systems: robots, equipped with high-precision mechanics, high-quality optics and high-speed video camera. AM works million times faster than a human microscope operator and can work 24 hours a day without getting tired.
Modern AMs are used for optical scanning of emulsion track detectors. Multi-tone detectors contain millions of emulsion films. Since the speed of AM limits the applicability of detectors, scientists are actively looking for ways to make the existing robots faster, as well as to create new, much faster generations. Such robotic microscopes will be indispensable in an experiment to search for dark matter, where it will be necessary to analyze tens of tons of nano-emulsion trackers with unprecedented accuracy in the shortest possible time.
“The machine vision technology allows AM to recognize objects in real time and independently decide whether to process their images or move to another point. Currently, the parallel computing technology CUDA and the GPU video cards are actively used to process a large (~2 GB/s from each video camera) image stream and accelerate intensive computing. We have also implemented the technology of the lens focal plane rotation”, — Alexandrov added.
According to the scientist, "the efficiency and accuracy of this approach turned out to be comparable with the traditional ones, while the scanning speed is proportional to the number of cameras installed, which suggests significant progress.
Next, the scientists intend to create and test a new generation working prototype using the technology of focal plane rotation implemented by them. The 10–100 times increased speed of such microscopes can significantly increase the volume of data processed, reduce the time of their analysis without large financial expenditures, and expand the limits of applicability of the emulsion track detector method".Future scientific experiments operating with such detectors will search for dark matter particles, study neutrino physics, study ion fragmentation for the needs of hadron cancer therapy and protect interplanetary missions crews from cosmic rays", — Alexandrov said.
