Ultrahigh pressure

One of FORCE’s goals is to provide our users with the capability to reach ultrahigh pressures that are outside the ranges of most high-pressure facilities. We plan to attain these pressures using the advanced apparatuses in FORCE and by taking advantage of recent advances in high-pressure science. The tungsten carbide second-stage anvil assemblies that are traditionally used in multi-anvil presses are designed to accommodate some deformation. At extremely high pressures, anvils made of sintered diamond must be used because the tungsten carbide cannot maintain structural integrity.

Ultrahigh pressures not only open avenues for simulating deeper earth conditions — such as mantle dynamics — but also synthesis of new materials such as transparent nano-crystalline ceramics.

Energy advances

The use of high-pressure apparatuses in materials science is still fairly novel, especially in the field of energy. Due to the unique nature of both high-pressure synthesis and processing methods, materials produced through these methods are often unable to replicate and showcase novel properties. 

For example, recent research used a high-pressure torsion press (like FORCE’s Twister) to produce ultrafine grain refinement. The resulting material was used to create batteries that perform 2–3x better than conventional batteries (Wang et al., 2023). Entirely new metastable materials — such as the rare earth monoxides already made at ASU (Brugman et al., 2023) — can also be synthesized in the multi-anvil. Many of these metastable materials, which are unable to be produced using any other synthesis method, have been computationally predicted to have super/semiconductive properties.

References:

Brugman, B. L., Han, Y., Leinbach, L. J., Leinenweber, K., van de Walle, A., Ushakov, S. V., … & Navrotsky, A. (2023). Computationally Led High Pressure Synthesis and Experimental Thermodynamics of Rock Salt Yttrium Monoxide. Chemistry of Materials, 36(1), 332-339.

Wang, Y., Lee, S., Yamamoto, K., Matsunaga, T., Miki, H., Iba, H., … & Uchimoto, Y. (2023). Properties of Composite Electrodes for All-solid-state Fluoride-ion Secondary Batteries Processed by High-pressure Torsion. Electrochemistry, 91(2), 027002-027002.