ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024 6 METALS | POLYMERS | CERAMICS Atha Energy Corp., Vancouver, B.C., will acquire 92 Energy and Latitude Uranium, two uranium-exploring companies. The deal provides access to 7.1 million acres of exploration area in some of the top uranium jurisdictions in Canada. athaenergy.com. distinct polymers, and 3D printing to reverse engineer a material that expands and contracts in response to temperature change with or without human intervention. Once fabricated into a tangible device, the team tested the new composite material’s ability to respond to temperature changes to perform a simple task—switch on LED lights. The team says one of the hallmarks of their work is the optimization process that helps scientists interpolate the distribution and geometries of the two different polymer materials needed. “Our next goal is to use this technique to add another level of complexity to a material’s programmed or autonomous behavior, such as the ability to sense the velocity of some sort of impact from another object,” explains researcher Shelly Zhang. “This will be critical for robotics materials to know how to STAINLESS STEEL FOR HYDROGEN PRODUCTION Researchers at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) achieved a breakthrough over conventional stainless steel and the development of stainless steel for hydrogen (SS-H ). The newly developed steel exhibits high corrosion resistance, enabling its potential application for green hydrogen production from seawater, where a novel sustainable solution is still in the pipeline. The performance of the new steel in a saltwater electrolyzer is comparable to the current industrial practice of using titanium for structural parts to produce hydrogen from desalted seawater or acid, while the cost of the new steel is much cheaper. By using a sequential dualpassivation strategy, the research team developed the novel SS-H with superior corrosion resistance. In addition to the single chromium oxide-based passive layer, a secondary manganesebased layer forms on the preceding chromium-based layer at ~720 megavolts (mV). The sequential dual-passivation mechanism prevents the SS-H from corrosion in chloride media to an ultrahigh potential of 1700 mV. According to the team, using SS-H is expected to cut the cost of structural material by about 40 times, showing promising potential for many industrial applications. www.hku.hk. RESPONSIVE COMPOSITE MATERIAL A new composite material that changes behavior in response to temperature was created by a collaborative team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Houston. These materials are poised to be part of the next generation of autonomous robotics that will interact with the environment. The team used computer algorithms, two A novel stainless steel for hydrogen developed by a team of researchers from the University of Hong Kong. Courtesy of HKU. Velo3D Inc.’s Sapphire family of 3D printers are the first to earn the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) Greenlevel Security Technical Implementation Guide Compliance. This allows the printers to be connected to the DoD’s top-secret router network and gives other users confidence that their metal 3D printers are hardened against cyberattacks. velo3D.com. BRIEFS British Steel will invest nearly $1.6 billion to replace two blast furnaces at its Scunthorpe plant with electric arc furnaces that can use up to 100% scrap steel as raw material, thus significantly reducing carbon emissions. www.britishsteel.co.uk. Research led by the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign produced a new temperature dependent 3D-printed polymer composite that can react to its environment. Courtesy of Shelly Zhang.
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