Scarce metals are found in a wide range of everyday objects around us. They are complicated to extract, difficult to recycle and so rare that several of them have become “conflict minerals” which can promote conflicts and oppression. A survey at Chalmers University of Technology now shows that there are potential technology-based solutions that can replace many of the metals with carbon nanomaterials, such as graphene.

They can be found in your computer, in your mobile phone, in almost all other electronic equipment and in many of the plastics around you. Society is highly dependent on scarce metals, and this dependence has many disadvantages.

Scarce metals such as tin, silver, tungsten and indium are both rare and difficult to extract since the workable concentrations are very small. This ensures the metals are highly sought after – and their extraction is a breeding ground for conflicts, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where they fund armed conflicts.

In addition, they are difficult to recycle profitably since they are often present in small quantities in various components such as electronics.

Rickard Arvidsson and Björn Sandén, researchers in environmental systems analysis at Chalmers University of Technology, have now examined an alternative solution: substituting carbon nanomaterials for the scarce metals. These substances – the best known of which is graphene – are strong materials with good conductivity, like scarce metals.

“Now technology development has allowed us to make greater use of the common element carbon,” says Sandén. “Today there are many new carbon nanomaterials with similar properties to metals. It’s a welcome new track, and it’s important to invest in both the recycling and substitution of scarce metals from now on.”

The Chalmers researchers have studied the main applications of 14 different metals, and by reviewing patents and scientific literature have investigated the potential for replacing them by carbon nanomaterials. The results provide a unique overview of research and technology development in the field.

According to Arvidsson and Sandén the summary shows that a shift away from the use of scarce metals to carbon nanomaterials is already taking place.

“There are potential technology-based solutions for replacing 13 out of the 14 metals by carbon nanomaterials in their most common applications. The technology development is at different stages for different metals and applications, but in some cases such as indium and gallium, the results are very promising,” Arvidsson says.

“This offers hope,” says Sandén. “In the debate on resource constraints, circular economy and society’s handling of materials, the focus has long been on recycling and reuse. Substitution is a potential alternative that has not been explored to the same extent and as the resource issues become more pressing, we now have more tools to work with.”

The research findings were recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Arvidsson and Sandén stress that there are significant potential benefits from reducing the use of scarce metals, and they hope to be able to strengthen the case for more research and development in the field.

“Imagine being able to replace scarce metals with carbon,” Sandén says. “Extracting the carbon from biomass would create a natural cycle.”

“Since carbon is such a common and readily available material, it would also be possible to reduce the conflicts and geopolitical problems associated with these metals,” Arvidsson says.

At the same time they point out that more research is needed in the field in order to deal with any new problems that may arise if the scarce metals are replaced.

“Carbon nanomaterials are only a relatively recent discovery, and so far knowledge is limited about their environmental impact from a life-cycle perspective. But generally there seems to be a potential for a low environmental impact,” Arvidsson says.

Facts:

Carbon nanomaterials consist solely or mainly of carbon, and are strong materials with good conductivity. Several scarce metals have similar properties. The metals are found, for example, in cables, thin screens, flame-retardants, corrosion protection and capacitors.

Rickard Arvidsson and Björn Sandén at Chalmers University of Technology have investigated whether the carbon nanomaterials graphene, fullerenes and carbon nanotubes have the potential to replace 14 scarce metals in their main areas of application (see table in attached image). They found potential technology-based solutions to replace the metals with carbon nanomaterials for all applications except for gold in jewellery. The metals which we are closest to being able to substitute are indium, gallium, beryllium and silver.

Many seashells, minerals, and semiconductor nanomaterials are made up of smaller crystals, which are assembled together like the pieces of a puzzle. Now, researchers have measured the forces that cause the crystals to assemble, revealing an orchestra of competing factors that researchers might be able to control.

The work has a variety of implications in both discovery and applied science. In addition to providing insights into the formation of minerals and semiconductor nanomaterials, it might also help scientists understand soil as it expands and contracts through wetting and drying cycles. In the applied realm, researchers might use the principles to develop new materials with unique properties for energy needs.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, describe how the arrangement of the atoms in the crystals creates forces that pull them together and align them for docking. The study reveals how the attraction becomes stronger or weaker as water is heated or salt is added, both of which are common processes in the natural world.

The multinational team, led by chemists Dongsheng Li and Jaehun Chun from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, explored the attractive forces between two crystal particles made from mica. A flaky mineral that is commonly used in electrical insulation, this silicon-based mineral is well-studied and easy to work with because it chips off in flat pieces with nearly-perfect crystal surfaces.

Forces and faces

Crystallization often occurs through assembly of multi-faceted building blocks: some faces on these smaller crystals line up better with others, like Lego blocks do. Li and Chun have been studying a specific crystallization process called oriented attachment. Among other distinguishing characteristics, oriented attachment occurs when smaller subunits of fledgling crystals align their best matching faces before clicking together.

The process creates various nonlinear forms: nanowires with branches, lattices that look like complicated honeycombs, and tetrapods — tiny structures that look like four-armed toy jacks. The molecular forces that contribute to this self-assembly are not well understood.

Molecular forces that come into play can attract or repel the tiny crystal building blocks to or from each other. These include a variety of textbook forces such as van der Waals, hydrogen bonding, and electrostatic, among others.

To explore the forces, Li, Chun and colleagues milled flat faces on tiny slabs of mica and put them on a device that measures the attraction between two pieces. Then they measured the attraction while twisting the faces relative to each other. The experiment allowed the mica to be bathed in a liquid that includes different salts, letting them test real-world scenarios.

The difference in this work was the liquid setup. Similar experiments by other researchers have been done dry under vacuum; in this work, the liquid created conditions that better simulate how real crystals form in nature and in large industrial methods. The team performed some of these experiments at EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at PNNL.

Twist and salt

One of the first things the team found was that the attraction between two pieces of mica rose and fell as the faces twisted relative to each other, like when trying to make a sandwich out of two flat refrigerator magnets (go on, try it). In fact, the attraction rose and fell every 60 degrees, corresponding with the internal architecture of the mineral, which is almost hexagonal like a honeycomb cell.

Although other researchers more than a decade ago had predicted this cyclical attraction would happen, this is the first time scientists had measured the forces. Knowing the strength of the forces is key to manipulating crystallization in a research or industrial setting.

But other things were abuzz in the mica face-off as well. Between the two surfaces, the liquid environment housed electrically charged ions from salts, normal elements found during crystallization in nature. The water and the ions formed a somewhat stable layer between the surfaces that partly kept them separated. And as they moved toward each other, the two mica surfaces paused there, balanced between molecular attraction and repulsion by water and ions.

The team also found they could manipulate the strength of that attraction by changing the type of ions, their concentration, and the temperature. Different types of ions and their concentrations changed electrostatic repulsion between the mica surfaces. The size of the ions and how many charges they carried also created more or less space within the meddling layer.

Lastly, higher temperatures increased the strength of the attraction, contrary to how temperature behaves in simpler, less complex scenarios. The researchers built a model of the competing forces that included van der Waals, electrostatic, and hydration forces.

In the future, the researchers say, the principles gleaned from this study can be applied to other materials, which would be calculated for the material of interest. For example, manipulating the attraction might allow researchers to custom-build crystals of desired sizes and shapes and with unique properties. Overall, the work provides insights into crystal growth through nanoparticle assembly in synthetic, biological, and geochemical environments.

A powdery mix of metal nanocrystals wrapped in single-layer sheets of carbon atoms, developed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), shows promise for safely storing hydrogen for use with fuel cells for passenger vehicles and other uses. And now, a new study provides insight into the atomic details of the crystals’ ultrathin coating and how it serves as selective shielding while enhancing their performance in hydrogen storage.

The study, led by Berkeley Lab researchers, drew upon a range of Lab expertise and capabilities to synthesize and coat the magnesium crystals, which measure only 3-4 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across; study their nanoscale chemical composition with X-rays; and develop computer simulations and supporting theories to better understand how the crystals and their carbon coating function together.

The science team’s findings could help researchers understand how similar coatings could also enhance the performance and stability of other materials that show promise for hydrogen storage applications. The research project is one of several efforts within a multi-lab R&D effort known as the Hydrogen Materials — Advanced Research Consortium (HyMARC) established as part of the Energy Materials Network by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fuel Cell Technologies Office in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Reduced graphene oxide (or rGO), which resembles the more famous graphene (an extended sheet of carbon, only one atom thick, arrayed in a honeycomb pattern), has nanoscale holes that permit hydrogen to pass through while keeping larger molecules at bay.

This carbon wrapping was intended to prevent the magnesium — which is used as a hydrogen storage material — from reacting with its environment, including oxygen, water vapor and carbon dioxide. Such exposures could produce a thick coating of oxidation that would prevent the incoming hydrogen from accessing the magnesium surfaces.

But the latest study suggests that an atomically thin layer of oxidation did form on the crystals during their preparation. And, even more surprisingly, this oxide layer doesn’t seem to degrade the material’s performance.

“Previously, we thought the material was very well-protected,” said Liwen Wan, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, a DOE Nanoscale Science Research Center, who served as the study’s lead author. The study was published in the Nano Letters journal. “From our detailed analysis, we saw some evidence of oxidation.”

Wan added, “Most people would suspect that the oxide layer is bad news for hydrogen storage, which it turns out may not be true in this case. Without this oxide layer, the reduced graphene oxide would have a fairly weak interaction with the magnesium, but with the oxide layer the carbon-magnesium binding seems to be stronger.

“That’s a benefit that ultimately enhances the protection provided by the carbon coating,” she noted. “There doesn’t seem to be any downside.”

David Prendergast, director of the Molecular Foundry’s Theory Facility and a participant in the study, noted that the current generation of hydrogen-fueled vehicles power their fuel cell engines using compressed hydrogen gas. “This requires bulky, heavy cylindrical tanks that limit the driving efficiency of such cars,” he said, and the nanocrystals offer one possibility for eliminating these bulky tanks by storing hydrogen within other materials.

The study also helped to show that the thin oxide layer doesn’t necessarily hinder the rate at which this material can take up hydrogen, which is important when you need to refuel quickly. This finding was also unexpected based on the conventional understanding of the blocking role oxidation typically plays in these hydrogen-storage materials.

That means the wrapped nanocrystals, in a fuel storage and supply context, would chemically absorb pumped-in hydrogen gas at a much higher density than possible in a compressed hydrogen gas fuel tank at the same pressures.

The models that Wan developed to explain the experimental data suggest that the oxidation layer that forms around the crystals is atomically thin and is stable over time, suggesting that the oxidation does not progress.

The analysis was based, in part, around experiments performed at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), an X-ray source called a synchrotron that was earlier used to explore how the nanocrystals interact with hydrogen gas in real time.

Wan said that a key to the study was interpreting the ALS X-ray data by simulating X-ray measurements for hypothetical atomic models of the oxidized layer, and then selecting those models that best fit the data. “From that we know what the material actually looks like,” she said.

While many simulations are based around very pure materials with clean surfaces, Wan said, in this case the simulations were intended to be more representative of the real-world imperfections of the nanocrystals.

A next step, in both experiments and simulations, is to use materials that are more ideal for real-world hydrogen storage applications, Wan said, such as complex metal hydrides (hydrogen-metal compounds) that would also be wrapped in a protective sheet of graphene.

“By going to complex metal hydrides, you get intrinsically higher hydrogen storage capacity and our goal is to enable hydrogen uptake and release at reasonable temperatures and pressures,” Wan said.

Some of these complex metal hydride materials are fairly time-consuming to simulate, and the research team plans to use the supercomputers at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) for this work.

“Now that we have a good understanding of magnesium nanocrystals, we know that we can transfer this capability to look at other materials to speed up the discovery process,” Wan said.

For the first time, physicists have successfully imaged spiral magnetic ordering in a multiferroic material. These materials are considered highly promising candidates for future data storage media. The researchers were able to prove their findings using unique quantum sensors that were developed at Basel University and that can analyze electromagnetic fields on the nanometer scale. The results – obtained by scientists from the University of Basel’s Department of Physics, the Swiss Nanoscience Institute, the University of Montpellier and several laboratories from University Paris-Saclay – were recently published in the journal Nature.

Multiferroics are materials that simultaneously react to electric and magnetic fields. These two properties are rarely found together, and their combined effect makes it possible to change the magnetic ordering of materials using electric fields.

This offers particular potential for novel data storage devices: multiferroic materials can be used to create nanoscale magnetic storage media that can be deciphered and modified using electric fields.

Magnetic media of this kind would consume very little power and operate at very high speeds. They could also be used in spintronics – a new form of electronics that uses electrons’ spin as well as electrical charge.

Spiral magnetic ordering

Bismuth ferrite is a multiferroic material that exhibits electric and magnetic properties even at room temperature. While its electrical properties have been studied in depth, there was no suitable method for representing magnetic ordering on the nanometer scale until now.

The group led by Georg-H.-Endress Professor Patrick Maletinsky, from the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the University of Basel’s Department of Physics, has developed quantum sensors based on diamonds with nitrogen vacancy centers. This allowed them, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Montpellier and the University Paris-Saclay in France, to depict and study the magnetic ordering of a thin bismuth ferrite film for the first time, as they report in Nature.

Knowing how the electron spins behave and how the magnetic field is ordered is of crucial importance for the future application of multiferroic materials as data storage.

The scientists were able to show that bismuth ferrite exhibits spiral magnetic ordering, with two superimposed electron spins (shown in red and blue in the image) adopting opposing orientations and rotating in space, whereas it was previously assumed that this rotation took place within a plane. According to the researchers, the quantum sensors now show that a slight tilt in these opposing spins leads to spatial rotation with a slight twist.

“Our diamond quantum sensors allow not only qualitative but also quantitative analysis. This meant we were able to obtain a detailed picture of the spin configuration in multiferroics for the first time,” explains Patrick Maletinsky. “We are confident that this will pave the way for advances in research into these promising materials.”

Vacancies with special properties

The quantum sensors they used consist of two tiny monocrystalline diamonds, whose crystal lattices have a vacancy and a nitrogen atom in two neighboring positions. These nitrogen vacancy centers contain orbiting electrons whose spins respond very sensitively to external electric and magnetic fields, allowing the fields to be imaged at a resolution of just a few nanometers.

Scientists at the University of Montpellier took the magnetic measurements using the quantum sensors produced in Basel. The samples were supplied by experts from the CNRS/Thales laboratory at University Paris-Saclay, who are leading lights in the field of bismuth ferrite research.

Quantum sensors for the market

The quantum sensors used in the research are suitable for studying a wide range of materials, as they provide precisely detailed qualitative and quantitative data both at room temperature and at temperatures close to absolute zero.

In order to make them available to other research groups, Patrick Maletinsky founded the start-up Qnami in 2016 in collaboration with Dr. Mathieu Munsch. Qnami produces the diamond sensors and provides application advice to its customers from research and industry.

The modern world relies on portable electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, cameras or camcorders. Many of these devices are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which could be smaller, lighter, safer and more efficient if the liquid electrolytes they contain were replaced by solids. A promising candidate for a solid-state electrolyte is a new class of materials based on lithium compounds, presented by physicists from Switzerland and Poland.

Commercially available lithium-ion batteries consist of two electrodes connected by a liquid electrolyte. This electrolyte makes it difficult for engineers to reduce the size and weight of the battery, in addition, it is subjected to leakage; the lithium in the exposed electrodes then comes into contact with oxygen in the air and undergoes self-ignition. Boeing’s troubles, which for many months caused a full grounding of Dreamliner flights, are a spectacular example of the problems brought about by the use of modern lithium-ion batteries.

Laboratories have been searching for solid materials capable of replacing liquid electrolytes for years. The most popular candidates include compounds in which lithium ions are surrounded by sulphur or oxygen ions. However, in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, a Swiss-Polish team of scientists has presented a new class of ionic compounds where the charge carriers are lithium ions moving in an environment of amine (NH2) and tetrahydroborate (BH4) ions. The experimental part of the research project was carried out at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Dübendorf, and at the University of Geneva (UG). The person responsible for the theoretical description of the mechanisms leading to the exceptionally high ionic conductivity of the new material was Prof. Zbigniew Lodziana from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.

“We were dealing with lithium amide-borohydride, a substance previously regarded as not being too good an ionic conductor. This compound is made by milling two constituents in a ratio of 1 to 3. To date, nobody has ever tested what happens to ionic conductivity when the proportions between these constituents are changed. We were the first to do so and suddenly it turned out that by reducing the number of NH2 groups to a certain limit we could significantly improve the conductivity. It increases so much that it becomes comparable to the conductivity of liquid electrolytes!” says Prof. Lodziana.

The several dozen-fold boost in ionic conductivity of the new material – the effect of a change in the proportion of its constituents – opens up a new, unexplored direction in the search for a candidate for a solid-state electrolyte. Previously, throughout the world, the focus was almost exclusively on changes in the composition of the chemical substance. It has now become apparent that, at the stage of production of the compound, a key role can be played by the proportions themselves of the ingredients used to manufacture them.

“Our lithium amide-borohydride is a representative of a promising new class of solid-state electrolyte materials. However, it will be some time before batteries built on such compounds come into use. For example, there should be no chemical reactions between the electrolyte and the electrodes leading to their degradation. This problem is still waiting for an optimal solution”, comments Prof. Lodziana.

The research prospects are promising. The scientists from Empa, UG and IFJ PAN did not confine themselves to just characterizing the physico-chemical properties of the new material. The compound was used as an electrolyte in a typical Li4Ti5O12 half-cell. The half-cell performed well, in tests of running down and recharging 400 times it proved to be stable. Promising steps have also been taken towards resolving another important issue. The lithium amide-borohydride described in the publication exhibited excellent ionic conductivity only at about 40 °C. In the most recent experiments this has already been lowered to below room temperature.

Theoretically, however, the new material remains a challenge. Hitherto models have been constructed for substances in which the lithium ions move in an atomic environment. In the new material, ions move among light molecules that adjust their orientation to ease the lithium movement.

“In the proposed model, the excellent ionic conductivity is a consequence of the specific construction of the crystalline lattice of the tested material. This network in fact consists of two sub-lattices. It turns out that the lithium ions are present here in the elementary cells of only one sub-lattice. However, the diffusion barrier between the sub-lattices is low. Under appropriate conditions, the ions thus travel to the second, empty sub-lattice, where they can move quite freely,” explains Prof. Lodziana.

The theoretical description presented here explains only some of the observed features of the new material. The mechanisms responsible for its high conductivity are certainly more complex. Their better understanding should significantly accelerate the search for optimal compounds for a solid-state electrolyte and consequently shorten the process of commercialization of new power sources that are most likely to revolutionize portable electronics.