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Researchers at UC Irvine have developed a sustainable and low-cost insulation material with the ability to dynamically manage heat exchange. This technology circumvents the limitations of previous thermal management systems by offering low-cost manufacturing, straightforward implementation, energy efficiency, and control of heat exchange.

The invention is flexible/stretchable soft battery for devices that seamlessly integrate for human-machine interface applications.  Such reconfigurable and soft batteries will play an important role as power sources can take up a large space in a system. To this end, the conformable/stretchable batteries of the embodiments provide an ideal power sources for these devices. Wearable devices attract lots of interest with a market share of over $116.2 billion/year, projected to be $265.4 billion by 2026

Need to transport sturdy adjustable workbenches for use at sea or other temporary work spaces that need anchoring to walls or floors and you can't find a commercially available source?

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Lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) are currently the dominant power sources for portable electronics and electric vehicles, both of which have rapidly growing markets. Recycling and re‐use of end‐of‐life LIBs, to reclaim lithium and transition metal resources and eliminate pollution from disposal of waste batteries, have become urgent tasks. Great effort has been made to recycle LIB cathode materials. State‐of‐the‐art approaches include pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, and direct recycling. The pyrometallurgical approach requires high temperature smelting as well as multi-step purification and separation processes; the hydrometallurgical approach requires acid leaching and subsequent complicated precipitation steps to produce precursors for the re-synthesis of new cathode materials. Both approaches have to totally destroy the LIB cathode particles which represent a significant amount of value from their primary manufacturing process. The direct recycling approach combines physical separation to harvest the cathode materials with high-pressure relithiation to regenerate cathode materials, where the high pressure process greatly increases the cost of regeneration.

Researchers have developed a simulation method to determine the properties of molecular enclosures based on slow growth thermodynamic integration (SGTI).

UCLA researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering have developed cellular porous metallic and ceramic structures that can be used to increase the production and recovery of tritium for fusion power reactors or as a support for electrode materials.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering have developed a carbon-coated silicon nanoparticle-based electrode material for lithium-ion batteries with high energy density and long lifetime.  They have also developed a scalable fabrication method for this material.

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Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have developed a new way to directly create 3-dimensional topological magnetic structures that allows for efficient information storage with potentially low energy dissipation.

The invention is a novel method for enhancing the energy, power and performance of lithium ion batteries. It applies a new process for electrodepositing Manganese Oxide in a way that improves the electrical properties as well as the rate at which the battery can operate. Using this method, the energy storage capabilities is boosted significantly; making it faster, more reliable and enabling various applications to become more dependent on electric/battery solutions.

The invention is novel way of preparing electrodes for nanowire-based batteries and capacitors with extremely long cycle lifetimes. The proposed assemblies last much longer than any comparable state of the art nanowire energy storage device, without loss of performance, and are comparable to liquid electrolyte-based technologies in terms of their figures of merit.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have developed a method of synthesizing micrometer tin particles with nanosporous architecture and have successfully demonstrated the use of these particles as a high energy density anode for Na-ion and Li-ion batteries. 

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UCLA researchers in the Department of Chemical Engineering have developed a novel method of preparing inorganic nanospheres with porous hollow interiors.

Controlling the magnetic properties of ferromagnetic (FM) layers without magnetic fields is an on-going challenge in condensed matter science with multiple technological implications. External stimuli (e.g., light, electric field) and proximity effects (e.g., materials susceptible to external driving forces) are the most used methods to control the magnetic properties. An interesting possibility along these lines is offered by ferromagnets in proximity to materials that undergo metal-insulator (MIT) and structural phase transition (SPT). SPT and MIT are usually driven by temperature but they may also be driven by current, light and pressure.   Thus, if the magnetism of the FM is affected by the proximity to materials that undergo MIT, then tuning the magnetic properties by multiple stimuli may become possible.

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Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a novel method to continuously pattern nanofibers on 2D and 3D substrates. A unique polymer ink formulation provides the right balance of viscosity and elasticity necessary to enable controlled, seamless near-field electrospinning of nanofibers at very low voltages.