NEWS RELEASES

The University of Rochester’s 110-year-old chemical engineering department recently changed its name to the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering, signaling the disciplines are closely intertwined and central to delivering affordable, reliable, and secure technologies with lower impacts on air, water, land, and communities. 

Four physicists from Rice University have received a $4.4 million grant over three years from the U.S. Department of Energy to establish the Rice Laboratory for Emergent Magnetic Materials (RLEMM). This new research center will investigate the fundamental interactions of magnetism and its role in next-generation technologies.

A new AI can fill in missing sensor data for fusion systems, offering even more detail than the real-world sensor could have provided. The AI, known as Diag2Diag, could prove essential for commercial fusion energy production by helping to reduce costs and ensure reliability. Diag2Diag also provided new support for a leading theory about controlling plasma disruptions, bringing us closer to using fusion to generate electricity for the power grid. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Princeton University were part of an international team behind the research, which was recently published in Nature Communications.

A team of researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities College of Science and Engineering and the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering has discovered and measured the fraction of an electron that makes catalytic manufacturing possible. This discovery provides insight for designing new breakthrough catalytic materials that could lead to more efficient and lower-cost manufacturing of fuels and chemicals.

Over the next decade, aluminum auto body scrap will flood salvage systems, much of it too impure for reuse in critical parts. ORNL researchers developed RidgeAlloy, a new aluminum alloy that turns low-value scrap into a reliable, high-value domestic supply for structural automotive manufacturing.

Caltech physicists have created the largest qubit array ever assembled: 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers. Previous arrays of this kind contained only hundreds of qubits.