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Today's KNOWLEDGE Share Striking the Perfect Balance: Lightweight vs. Comfort in Airplane Cabins  When flying, we all cherish the unique experience of traveling by air. Today, let's delve into a fascinating topic that often sparks debate: the delicate balance between "Lightweight" and "Comfort" in airplane cabins.  Lightweight Innovations: With advancements in materials, technology, and engineering, airlines have been relentlessly striving to make their aircraft lighter. Why? Lighter planes lead to significant fuel savings, reduced emissions, and ultimately, a more sustainable future for air travel. These innovations are remarkable feats of engineering that we can't help but support with our Additive Fusion Technology (AFT)™ design & manufacturing standard!  The Pursuit of Passenger Comfort: At the heart of every aviation endeavor lies the utmost priority – passenger comfort. Airlines continuously invest in enhancing the in-flight experience, providi...

Resolving a 200-year-old challenge, Bengaluru physicists have developed a “heat engine” that generates high-power with high-efficiency, overcoming a “trade-off” associated with all types of engines, from cars and aeroplanes to nuclear reactors. The path-breaking discovery from researchers at the Indian Institute of Sciences and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research opens up the door to design fundamentally new engines using the novel concept, and can be translated into developing tiny microscopic engines for targeted drug delivery inside cells. “This is a conceptual breakthrough that opens up many new doors. It is the beginning of a fresh journey. What was thought impossible, has been achieved, Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Union government and a co-author of the study, told DH. In 1824, French engineer Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot – known as the father of thermodynamics – proposed what is known as the Carnot engine, the most efficient engine which is...

  Today's KNOWLEDGE Share Toray just unveiled TORAYCA™ T1200, the world's ultra high-strength carbon fiber. This carbon fiber helps move us forward to reducing environmental footprints by making carbon fiber-reinforced plastic materials lighter. This also opens a new performance frontier for strength-driven applications, from aerostructures and defense to alternative energy and consumer products. Leveraging this fundamental technology led Toray to develop TORAYCA™ T1200 in its new facility within the Ehime Plant (in Masaki-cho, Ehime Prefecture). T1200 has a tensile strength of up to 1,160 Ksi, more than 10% higher than TORAYCA™ T1100, which currently has the highest tensile strength available. T1100 applications include defense weapon systems, space, aircraft, and sports and leisure equipment. Toray began the commercial production of TORAYCA™ carbon fiber in 1971 at the Ehime Plant and diversified the application into compressed natural gas and high-pressure hydrogen tanks, au...

The research group of professor Kotohiro Nomura, Tokyo Metropolitan University, in cooperation with the research group of director Hiroshi Hirano, Osaka Research Institute of Industrial Science and Technology, has developed biobased polyesters from inedible plant resources, which can be easily chemical recyclable and exhibit promising mechanical properties in film than commodity plastics. Promising Alternative Materials to Commodity Polymers: The development of high-performance sustainable, recyclable plastics is an important subject to realize circular economy. Biobased polyesters made from plant resources are expected to become promising alternative materials to commodity polymers such as  #polyethylene  and  #polypropylene  produced from petroleum. However, there have been few examples of the development of high-performance materials that exceed required mechanical properties such as tensile strength and elongation at break. Synthesis methods for hi...

Sumitomo Chemical begins construction of a pilot facility to establish a process for producing propylene directly from ethanol, which is attracting attention as a sustainable chemical raw material. The development of this technology is one of the projects supported by the NEDO Green Innovation (GI) Fund. Generating Hydrogen as a By-product: The Company will work to complete the construction of the pilot facility at the Sodegaura site of its Chiba Works in Japan by the first half of 2025 and step-up efforts to quickly implement the technology in society. Propylene is an essential chemical product. Currently, it is mainly produced by cracking fossil resources, such as naphtha, and classified as an upstream petrochemical. Ethanol, meanwhile, can be produced from biomass, such as sugarcane and corn, and it is anticipated that technology for manufacturing ethanol at scale from combustible waste, waste plastics or CO2 will be established in the near future. Expectations are rising f...

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share Is Graphene Safe?   Graphene is a nanomaterial that is made from pure carbon. It is often described as a two-dimensional (2D) material because it is only a few carbon atoms thick and therefore is almost entirely surface area. Graphene can also be considered a “family” of materials because it comes in many forms and types including graphene oxide, reduced #grapheneoxide , graphene sheets, graphene flakes and other versions of this amazing material.   It is precisely because of the 2D characteristics and dimensions that make graphene one of the strongest and most electrically and thermally conductive materials ever measured. These attributes make it an extremely interesting material to use to make other materials better, lighter, stronger, more durable and more recyclable.   Because it is based on carbon, graphene can be used in an astonishingly wide scope of applications, from extremely sensitive sensors to high performance textiles, to much more effi...