The energy can then be used for heating in winter

11-May-2022

Storing energy over the long term is arguably the biggest unsolved problem of the energy transition. A new type of chemical heat storage system has now been invented at TU Wien (Vienna) that can store large amounts of energy in an environmentally friendly way for a virtually unlimited period of ...

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How a chemical reaction takes place that, at first glance, should not be possible at the temperatures observed

05-Apr-2022

What happens when a cat climbs onto a sunflower? The sunflower is unstable, will quickly bend, and the cat will fall to the ground. However, if the cat only needs a quick boost to catch a bird from there, then the sunflower can act as a "metastable intermediate step". This is essentially the ...

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In materials research, considerable progress is made by exploiting insights from the field of topology: Similar tools can now be applied to lasers

01-Mar-2022

A donut is not a bun. From a mathematical point of view, they are two fundamentally different objects: The donut has a hole, the bun does not. A circle inside the donut around its hole in the center cannot be shrunk to a point. An arbitrary circle inside the bun, however, can. The mathematical ...

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Creating a sponge-like hole structure on the nanometre scale that allows small molecules to pass through, record-breaking chemical reactivity was achieved

16-Feb-2022

Catalysts are often solid materials whose surface comes into contact with gases or liquids, thereby enabling certain chemical reactions. However, this means that any atoms of the catalyst that are not on the surface serve no real purpose. Therefore, it is important to produce extremely porous ...

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This could help, for example, to increase the storage capability per volume for hydrogen or to build chemical sensors with higher sensitivity

02-Feb-2022

How do you integrate as much as possible of the 2D material graphene into a limited space? By producing it not on a flat surface, but on a 3D nanostructure. The carbon material graphene has no well-defined thickness, it merely consists of one single layer of atoms. It is therefore often referred ...

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A novel, simple and extremely compact radiation source for terahertz waves: The possible applications are manifold.

13-Jan-2022

Terahertz radiation has a wavelength of typically a little less than one millimetre - a technically difficult range. Electromagnetic waves with longer wavelengths can be generated with ordinary electronic components (such as transistors) and antennas. Smaller wavelengths can be obtained with ...

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Since the 1960s, there has been speculation about a hypothetical propulsion method for interstellar space travel

22-Dec-2021

In science fiction stories about contact with extraterrestrial civilisations, there is a problem: What kind of propulsion system could make it possible to bridge the enormous distances between the stars? It cannot be done with ordinary rockets like those used to travel to the moon or Mars. Many ...

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Researchers are investigating new materials that can be used to reduce the operation temperature of solid oxide fuel cells: To do so, they apply an innovative method

02-Dec-2021

Solid oxide fuel cells consist of three important parts: an anode, a cathode and an electrolyte. While oxygen is incorporated into the cathode, oxygen is then transported through the electrolyte to the anode, where oxygen reacts with hydrogen to water. The fuel cell is able to convert the energy ...

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Circular economy for CO2

18-Nov-2021

To establish a carbon-neutral circular economy in the future, technologies are needed that use carbon dioxide as a raw material. In the form of formate, CO2 can be metabolised by certain bacteria. Acetogens are a group of bacteria that can metabolise formate. For example, they form acetic acid – ...

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A surprising discovery: A catalyst seems to contradict usual laws and can exhibit completely different activity states at the same time

17-Nov-2021

Sometimes chemical reactions in the lab work the way you imagine them to, and sometimes they don't. Neither is unusual. What is highly unusual, however, is what a research team at TU Wien has now observed when studying hydrogen oxidation on a rhodium catalyst: The surface of a rhodium foil can be ...

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