ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | MARCH 2025 6 METALS | POLYMERS | CERAMICS Stardust Power Inc., Greenwich, Conn., broke ground in January on its lithium refinery in Muskogee, Okla. The project’s first phase will build a production line to make 25,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium per year. The second phase will add another line, doubling capacity. stardustpower.com POLYMER EDITING FOR PLASTICS Chemists at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tenn., have found a way to edit the polymers of discarded plastics and generate new macromolecules with more valuable properties than those of the starting material. The discovery could lead to the ability to rearrange polymeric building blocks to customize the properties of plastics. In some experiments, the team worked with polybutadiene, common in rubber tires. In other cases, they worked with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, often used for things like toys, keyboards, and appliances. Researchers shredded synthetic or commercial polybutadiene and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene and immersed the material in dichloromethane to conduct a chemical reaction at 40°C for less than two hours. CORDIERITE’S THERMAL EXPANSION EXPLAINED Researchers at Queen Mary University of London report discovering the fundamental reasons behind cordierite’s ability to resist changes in size despite significant temperature fluctuations. They say their findings could have profound implications for the design and development of advanced materials. While widely used in applications from pizza stones and catalytic converters to high-temperature industrial processes, the mineral’s unusual thermal behavior has not been well understood until now. Unlike most materials, cordierite displays an unusual combination of thermal expansions—low positive expansion along two perpendicular axes and negative expansion along the third. This unique behavior has made cordierite especially useful in applications requiring exceptional thermal stability. In their study, the team used advanced lattice dynamics and molecular dynamics simulations, employing transferable force fields to model the atomic structure of cordierite under varying thermal conditions. The simulations accurately reproduced experimental data, providing insights into the mineral’s behavior at both low and high temperatures. At lower temperatures, the scientists observed that lower-frequency vibrations favor negative thermal expansion along all three axes. At higher temperatures, higher-frequency vibrations dominate, leading to positive expansion. Further, these actions are counterbalanced by the material’s elastic properties, which act like a 3D hinge to effectively cancel out many of the thermal effects. These findings could lead to the design of materials with tailored thermal properties, say researchers. The method of combining simulations of atomic vibrations with elasticity models could be directly applied to other anisotropic materials. www.qmul.ac.uk. Standard Lithium Ltd., Lewisville, Ark., and Equinor, Houston, announced Smackover Lithium as the new name for their joint venture developing direct lithium extraction projects in Southwest Arkansas and East Texas. smackoverlithium.com. BRIEFS Crystal structure of cordierite. Courtesy of M. Dove et al./Matter. To upcycle the polymers of plastic waste, chemists generated new macromolecules with more valuable properties than the original material. Courtesy of Adam Malin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy.
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