In the future, it could become easier to manufacture methanol from biomass decentrally and on site. Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) are proposing a method with which raw and waste materials from plants can be processed in a self-contained procedure under mild reaction conditions.

This method means that the complex drying and transportation of biomass to large biomass gasification plants becomes superfluous. The results are published in the journal Green Chemistry.

Methanol is a versatile basic chemical and promising energy carrier—for example, as a drop-in fuel that can be used directly in existing vehicles. The methyl alcohol with the chemical formula CH₃OH is currently mainly gained from fossil natural gas, making this process incompatible with long-term climate goals.

“Sustainable methanol from biomass will be able to compensate a proportion of methanol production from fossil fuels in the future. However, the current methods mean that this process is very complex and uses large amounts of energy,” says Dr. Patrick Schühle from the Chair of Chemical Reaction Engineering at FAU.

Research into methanol synthesis from biomass has primarily focused on biomass gasification up to now. During this process, waste material from agriculture or forestry and waste products such as hydrolysates from paper manufacturing is first dried, often ground up and subsequently transported to large gasification plants.

The material is first converted into synthesis gas at temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius and subsequently converted into methanol at pressures of between 50 and 100 bar. Since dry biomass has a lower volumetric energy density, it is often made into pellets before being transported, which means additional costs are involved.

80% carbon efficiency

The new method has a decisive advantage in that it enables wet biomass such as pomace, grass cuttings, wood chips or straw to be processed without prior drying. Since further processing such as shredding and pelleting is not required and hardly any external process heat, smaller plants can also be used.

“This process allows methanol to be produced in a more decentralized manner than was previously possible,” says Schühle. “Investing in this new technology could definitely be worthwhile for large farms or forestry operations or agricultural cooperatives.” The researchers have also been using the expertise of OxFA GmbH, a company based in Scheßlitz near Bamberg and a world leader in producing formic acid from biomass.

Competitive costs

Since the costs for methanol production mainly depend on the availability of green hydrogen, the researchers incorporated an electrolyzer into their design. It produces the oxygen and the hydrogen required for the reaction by splitting water.

Schühle says, “Electrolysis requires large amounts of energy. Ideally, the electricity required comes from renewable sources, such as photovoltaics or a local wind farm.”

Agrivoltaics, which is the use of agricultural land for producing both food and electricity, is increasingly being discussed in this context. With feed-in tariffs continuing to stagnate or even decline, it is becoming more economically attractive to use electricity generated by PV to produce methanol. In addition, it would be possible to produce methanol by storing formic acid temporarily only when electricity prices are particularly favorable.

“We have calculated that green methanol could be produced in the future at a similar cost to methanol produced using natural gas,” explains Schühle. “This means it could make a meaningful contribution to the defossilization of our industrial landscape from an economic point of view.”

From health monitors and smartwatches to foldable phones and portable solar panels, demand for flexible electronics is growing rapidly. But the durability of those devices—their ability to stand up to thousands of folds, flexes and rolls—is a significant concern.

New research by engineers from Brown University has revealed surprising details about how cracks form in multilayer flexible electronic devices. The team shows that small cracks in a device’s fragile electrode layer can drive deeper, more destructive cracks into the tougher polymer substrate layer on which the electrodes sit. The work overturns a long-held assumption that polymer substrates usually resist cracking.

“The substrate in flexible electronic devices is a bit like the foundation in your house,” said Nitin Padture, a professor of engineering at Brown and corresponding author of the study published in npj Flexible Electronics. “If it’s cracked, it compromises the mechanical integrity of the entire device. This is the first clear evidence of cracking in a device substrate caused by a brittle film on top of it.”

The layers used in flexible electronics have specific jobs. The top layer conducts electricity across the surface to keep the device running. That layer is usually made of special ceramic oxide materials because they are transparent and also good conductors, which is essential for things like display screens, sensors and solar cells. But ceramics are brittle and prone to cracking, so the substrate’s job is to add some toughness. Substrates are generally made from polymer materials that are highly flexible and resist cracking.

While using these materials to make flexible solar cells, Anush Ranka, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown who performed the work as a Ph.D. student in materials science, became increasingly curious about the mechanism by which fatigue can degrade performance. He decided to take a closer look at the cracking processes.

For the study, Ranka made small experimental devices using various types of ceramic electrodes and polymer substrates. He then subjected them to bending tests and used a powerful electron microscope to examine the cracks. In places where he found cracks in the ceramic layer, he used a focused ion beam—a kind of nanoscale sandblaster—to etch away the ceramic and reveal the substrate directly beneath a ceramic crack.

The work showed that cracks in the ceramic layer often drive deeper cracks into the substrate. The effect occurred across ceramic and polymer combinations, suggesting this is a common—and surprising—failure mechanism in flexible electronics.

Once cracks form deep in the polymer, the researchers say, they become permanent structural defects. With repeated bending, these cracks widen, misalign or fill with debris, which then prevents the ceramic crack faces from reconnecting. That causes electrical resistance to increase and device performance to degrade.

Working with Haneesh Kesari, a Brown engineering professor who specializes in theoretical and applied mechanics, and solid mechanics Ph.D. student Sayaka Kochiyama, the researchers analyzed this cracking problem. They showed that a mismatch in the elastic properties of the two layers was driving the deep cracking phenomenon in the substrate. Understanding the cracking mechanism led the team toward a potential fix: Adding a third layer of material between the ceramic and the substrate that mitigates the elastic mismatch.

“We created a design map that identified hundreds of polymers that—with the correct thickness—could potentially mitigate this elastic mismatch and prevent cracking in a wide range of electrode-substrate combinations,” said Padture, who leads Brown’s Initiative for Sustainable Energy. “Using this design map, we were able to choose a specific polymer for the third layer and experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.”

The researchers are hopeful that the design diagram will make for more durable devices. Just as important, however, is the discovery that cracks do indeed affect polymer substrates—a fact that was not apparent before this research.

“We’re essentially solving a problem people didn’t know they had,” Padture said. “We think this could significantly improve the cyclic life of flexible devices.”

While the world focuses on Apple’s latest slew of new products, we are taking a moment for the last bastion of Apple’s proprietary past—the one remaining product with a Lightning connector that, somehow, Apple still sells.

We have previously lamented Apple’s drawn-out transition to USB-C. It’s been far from quick and far from straightforward, leaving a mess of dongles and confusion in its wake.

It was last year, at its September 2024 “Glowtime” event, that Apple made the move to change that, transitioning all of its newest products to USB-C. The following month, it—somewhat quietly—moved the remaining current-generation accessories, including the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad, over to USB-C.

By February this year, it had completely discontinued the remaining Lightning-supporting iPhones—the iPhone SE (3rd Gen) and the iPhone 14—following the EU’s ruling for all of its devices to move to a nonproprietary connector by 2025.

But one solitary device is still hanging on as the final Lightning product that Apple sells. That product is the Apple Pencil (1st Gen)—a product that was released 10 years ago, in 2015.

The Apple Pencil strategy has been pretty complicated, with Apple selling no less than four different models. The absence of backward compatibility of newer Pencils has kept the Gen 1 Pencil in the lineup to service the older Lightning-supporting iPads—as well as being compatible with the 10th- and 11th-Gen USB-C iPads, for anyone who upgraded.

Apple generally supports its hardware with OS updates for five to seven years. Even though it no longer sells these products, Apple has confirmed that iPadOS 26 will be compatible with the iPad Air (3rd Gen) and iPad Mini (5th Gen), both released in 2019, and the iPad (8th and 9th Gen), released in 2020 and 2021, respectively. All of these only support the Apple Pencil (1st Gen), and none of the other Pencils above it, meaning it’s seemingly a hard product for Apple to get rid of—despite its desperately aging connector.

Based on that five-to-seven-year timeline, that could mean the Lightning still has as many as three years left in it, unless Apple makes the call to update the original Pencil to USB-C and finally retires Lightning for good.