Three day conference showcases emerging materials for defence and Infrastructure

  16 Oct 2016 , 11:44

A three-day conference-cum-exhibition on material engineering technology and heat treat ended with a showcase of the latest advancements in materials and processes for industrial application specifically in the defence and infrastructure sector. Union Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar inaugurated the conference on Wednesday in the presence of industrialist Sajjan Jindal and scientist R A Mashelkar.

Speaking on the occasion, Parrikar said that India shares $1 billion of the global heat treat market which is growing at 12 per cent per annum. He added that this exhibition is truly international as 300 participants from all over the world have congregated on a single platform. “With the growing population of the world, resources are getting scarce and expensive. Materials & Engineering conference focuses on developing new materials, processes, theories and computational models to understand materials,” Parrikar added.

“Emerging Materials for Defence and Infrastructure” was the theme for the three-day event. “The fast growing Asian economies have created market opportunities for heat treatment technologies, products, services and equipment. The growth of the Indian infrastructure and automotive industry is providing the demand for most heat treating activities. Over all, the potential for growth of furnace building activity and heat treatment activity is huge, driven primarily by the growth of the auto sector,” said Prem Aurora, Chairman of ASM International India Chapter that organised the event.

IANS

Researchers engineer a new material that can make computers 100 times more energy efficient

Image: Reuters

  05 Oct 2016 , 14:06

Researchers including one of Indian-origin have engineered a material that could lead to a new generation of computing devices, packing in more computing power while consuming nearly 100 times less energy thant today’s electronics require. “Electronics are the fastest-growing consumer of energy worldwide,” said one of the study authors, Ramamoorthy Ramesh from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US.

“Today, about five per cent of our total global energy consumption is spent on electronics, and that’s projected to grow to 40-50 percent by 2030 if we continue at the current pace and if there are no major advances in the field that lead to lower energy consumption,” Ramesh said. Known as a magnetoelectric multiferroic material, it combines electrical and magnetic properties at room temperature and relies on a phenomenon called “planar rumpling.”

The new material sandwiches together individual layers of atoms, producing a thin film with magnetic polarity that can be flipped from positive to negative or vice versa with small pulses of electricity.  In the future, device-makers could use this property to store the binary digits that underpin computing devices. “Before this work, there was only one other room-temperature multiferroic whose magnetic properties could be controlled by electricity,” said John Heron, Assistant Professor at University of Michigan who worked on the material with researchers at Cornell University.

“That electrical control is what excites electronics makers, so this is a huge step forward,” Heron noted. Room-temperature multiferroics are a hotly pursued goal in the electronics field because they require much less power to read and write data than today’s semiconductor-based devices.  In addition, their data doesn’t vanish when the power is shut off. Those properties could enable devices that require only brief pulses of electricity instead of the constant stream that’s needed for current electronics, using an estimated 100 times less energy. A paper on the work was published in the journal Nature.

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