From pollution to pigments—Appalachian community turns mine waste into marketable product

Rural Action, an Appalachian-based nonprofit, aims to fund the remediation of water affected by acid mine drainage by selling pigments made from iron oxide extracted from the affected waterways.

Credit: Business Insider, YouTube

News & Trends

• DOE Transmission Interconnection Roadmap sets targets for hooking clean energy up to the grid
• Hydrogen train record raises expectations for sustainable transportation
• High-throughput manufacturing of hydrogen technologies

Research Briefs

• Near-surface dislocation mechanisms allow room-temp deformation of polycrystalline ceramics
• Hardness breakthrough: New experimentally synthesized carbon nitrides may rival diamond
• Cross-cultural study provides insight into how pottery forms change across communities
• Dairy residues on Neolithic pottery show that ancient Europeans relied on cheese from multiple species

Ceramics in Energy

• From trash to treasure: Environmentally friendly recovery processes for battery scrap reuse

Advances in Nanomaterials

• Stretching the limits of auxetic expansion: Tungsten semicarbide nanosheets set new record

Txg

Tx

In this month’s ACerS Journals Topical Collection, “Recycling and reusing ceramics and glass,” we explore some of the nuanced and various factors that must be considered when recycling and reusing ceramic and glass materials. View the collection.

In addition, the articles below represent but a few of the outstanding papers authored by current graduate students that were submitted for the ACerS Journals Rising Stars initiative and published in ACerS' four journals.

Credit: C. Stern et al., JACerS

• Correlative characterization of plasma etching resistance of various aluminum garnets
  By C. Stern, C. Schwab, M. Kindelmann, et al.
  Journal of the American Ceramic Society
• Engineering grain boundary energy with thermal profiles to control grain growth in SrTiO₃
  By V. Muralikrishnan, J. Langhout, D. P. Delellis, et al.
  Journal of the American Ceramic Society
• Chromium-substituted bismuth titanate–niobate exhibiting superior piezoelectric performance for high-temperature applications
  By Q. Wang, E. M. Liang, and C. M. Wang
  Journal of the American Ceramic Society
• Selective laser sintering and spark plasma sintering of (Zr,Nb,Ta,Ti,W)C compositionally complex carbide ceramics
  By L. Trinh, Z. Hua, K. Bawane, et al.
  Journal of the American Ceramic Society

Meeting highlights

• Structural clay experts convene in Oklahoma City for networking and plant tours
• 14^th Advances in Cement-Based Materials covers all aspects of cements research, from basic to applied
• Ceramic scientists and engineers experience the magic of Montréal at ICC’10

Upcoming meetings

MST24

ICACC25

EMA25

PACRIM25

View the full event calendar at this link.

Check out these recent additions to the ACerS Webinar Archives:

Ceramic additive manufacturing, cold sintering, and defect metrology

Original air date: April 24, 2024
Hosted by: Washington, D.C./Maryland/Virginia Section
Featured speaker(s): Russell Maier

Navigating a scientific career in the national labs

Original air date: May 20, 2024
Hosted by: ACerS President’s Council of Student Advisors
Featured speaker(s): Rama Vasudevan

Ceramic Tech Chat: Sergei Kalinin

Hosted by ACerS Bulletin editors, Ceramic Tech Chat talks with ACerS members to learn about their unique and personal stories of how they found their way to careers in ceramics. New episodes publish the third Wednesday of each month.

In the June 2024 episode of Ceramic Tech Chat, Sergei Kalinin, Weston Fulton Professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, shares how his development of advanced scanning probe microscopy techniques led to an interest in machine learning and describes some of the benefits, limitations, and challenges of adopting machine learning for materials research.

Check out a preview from his episode, where he discusses some of the challenges that come with using machine learning to tackle big data problems.

“The vast majority of machine learning algorithms are not causal. You have features and targets, but you can flip targets and features it is still a legitimate machine learning problem. As a result, the best majority of the machine learning methods that rely on big data can be useful under certain scenarios, but they’re no substitute for human intuition, decision making, and general planning. So they can help, but they cannot take over the human role for the time being.”

Listen to Kalinin’s whole interview—and all our other Ceramic Tech Chat episodes—at this link.