The December 14 issue of Advanced Materials features our work on carbon fibers on its back cover.

The study presents the “D-loops”, a new type of structural defect in carbon fibers, which may have highly detrimental effect on their mechanical properties and can define a new fundamental upper limit to their strength. These defects form exclusively during polyacrylonitrile (PAN) carbonization, act as stress concentrators in the graphitic basal plane, and cannot be removed by local annealing.

Related:

• Rice News: Study explains strength gap between graphene, carbon fiber
• Futurity.org: Bad ‘zipper’ explains trouble with carbon fibers
•  E. S. Penev, V. I. Artyukhov, B. I. Yakobson, “Basic structural units in carbon fibers: Atomistic models and tensile behavior”, Carbon 85, 72–78 (2015)

Luqing Wang, a 4th-year graduate student in Yakobson Group, has received the 2016 Shell Graduate Fellowship awarded by the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology.

The Ken Kennedy Institute is dedicated to the advancement of research in the fields of computing, data science and information technology, and the award recipients were selected on the basis of their research proposals which contribute to computing and data issues the oil and gas industry currently faces.

While a majority of the program’s fellowship awards are funded by energy industry players, including BP, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger and Shell, support is also provided from the Ken Kennedy Cray Graduate Fellowship, the Andrew Ladd Memorial Excellence Fund in Computer Science Fellowship and funding from the annual Rice Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Conference (OG-HPC).

– See more at Rice News

Henry Yu, a 4th year graduate student in the Applied Physics/MSNE program, has won 2nd place in the 2016 NSCI Image Contest held by the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, Rice University. The image shows a graphite screw dislocation structure as a nano solenoid, which can hold magnetic field orders of magnitude greater than that of planet Earth. It was produced from an actual atomic geometry, using VMD, our own Edgecount tool, MeshLab, Python scripting, and the mighty Gimp.

To learn more about the science behind the image, see:
– Rice News: Graphene nano-coils are natural electromagnets
– F. Xu, H. Yu, A. Sadrzadeh, and B. I. Yakobson, “Riemann Surfaces of Carbon as Graphene Nanosolenoids“, Nano Lett. 16, 34–39 (2016)