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Vodafone Greece automates deals for customers, saves 500 staff-days of work | Computer Weekly
Vodafone Greece claims to have saved 500 staff days a year in manual work after rolling out technology to automate previously labour-intensive marketing campaigns as it seeks to win new customers and keep its existing ones.
The telecoms company has rolled out software that allows it to send tailored deals and offers to customers based on their history and interactions with the company on its website, mobile app, in stores and in call centres.
The project has helped Vodafone Greece become one of Vodafone’s top three performing markets, decision strategy chapter lead Georgios Papadas told Computer Weekly.
Since it was founded in 1992, Vodafone Greece has acquired more than three million customers and has grown its revenues to more than €1bn. It is part of the wider Vodafone group, which operates in 21 countries, boasts 12,000 shops, and more than 350 million customers worldwide.
Vodafone as an organisation has been rolling out software supplied by Massachusetts-based Pegasystems across its business operations for some years, as part of a programme to ensure it can give its customers the same personalised offers on phones, broadband and other services, no matter how they choose to interact with the company.
Vodafone Greece began its own programme to deploy Pega’s platform in 2020. Vodafone’s Greek operation previously relied on its marketing staff to devise and run multiple marketing campaigns every month.
The campaigns covered multiple product lines including pre-paid mobile phones, fixed contract phones, broadband and television packages. However, they were often overlapping, and did not always target the right business priorities.
Vodafone Greece was also grappling with an untidy estate of sometimes inappropriate technology. It had grown through acquisitions of smaller companies over the years, leaving it with multiple databases and out-of-date software.
The company relied on IBM’s SPSS Modeler, a tool designed for data mining and analytics to model its monthly campaigns, a task it was not designed to do. It was a complex piece of software, and few people in the organisation had the knowledge to make changes to campaigns once they had been created in the tool, says Papadas.
Each campaign took three to five working days a month to develop, test and execute, and with up to 10 campaigns running a month, it was also resource intensive. If a campaign manager was off work sick or left the company, there was no backup plan. And because each campaign operated independently, monitoring and reporting on the results of campaigns was difficult.
Learning from Accenture
Vodafone Greece set its sights on building an “omni-channel” that would ensure it could communicate with customers in a consistent way no matter what communication channel they chose.
The company hired Accenture as an implementation partner to roll out Pega’s Customer Decision Hub software, while Vodafone’s own staff learned how to use the technology. Over time, Vodafone was able to take on more work in-house while reducing its dependence on Accenture. That led to significant savings in fees.
In 2020, Vodafone started a project to bring mobile phone product campaigns into Pega and began migrating data over from existing databases into the Pega platform. Its staff spent much of the first two years learning how to use the software.
By 2022, Vodafone felt confident enough to set up a dedicated Pega team to build databases and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The team also set about linking Vodafone’s CRM system and its customer service Chatbot, and Viber, a messaging service widely used in Greece, into Pega. Vodafone’s internal project team started with six or seven people and at its peak reached 40 or 50.
Six months later the company went live with its first campaign developed entirely by Vodafone staff, scoring an early success with a conversion rate into sales that was two or three times greater than previous campaigns.
Vodafone now manages all of its Pega work internally. “That gives us the agility, ownership and confidence” to focus on the needs of the business, says Papadas. “We have really decreased our time to market compared to how it was done by [Accenture],” he adds. “I think that has been one of the biggest successes.”
Finding the right skills
Papadas says that one of the biggest challenges of the project was finding people with the right technical skills. IT professionals with skills in Pega, a specialist technology, are difficult to find, so Papadas opted to hire people and train them from scratch.
He told recruits they had three learning curves: learning how to use Pega; learning the telecommunications industry; and learning Vodafone Greece – its people, technology and datasets.
“I describe Pega in our operation as a car,” says Papadas. “It needs to keep moving while we tweak the engine. The question is finding the right people and training them fast enough.”
The company set up a “buddy system” so that every new recruit had an experienced person to guide them. That was combined with video training and, for more technical issues, written documentation – but with a focus on real-world tasks.
The end of spam
The project means that Vodafone’s customers receive the same support no matter how they approach Vodafone, says Papadas.
In the past, a customer could receive an offer for a product from Vodafone by phone, visit a shop and receive a slightly different quote for the same product, and then be quoted a different – potentially higher – price on Vodafone’s app.
The technology also ensures that customers do not receive large numbers of spam messages. Pega has enabled Vodafone to set rules so that if a customer has received, say, a message today, or three messages in the past week, they will not be prompted with further marketing messages.
Vodafone is also able to send better targeted messages, says Papadas. For example, if the data shows there are people who never open the Vodafone app, they will be taken out of the campaign. “The success rate will be very much better,” he says. “It’s maths, not rocket science.”
What is the next best action?
The software is able to recommend the “next best action” that Vodafone call centre staff or shop assistants can take to encourage a particular customer to stay loyal or buy extra products based on that customer’s history and real-time interactions.
That tailored approach has allowed Vodafone to move away from “carpet bombing” customers with one or two standard offers in the hope they appeal to enough people.
The company is able to send real-time offers to customers on the Vodafone app. “It is the right message at the right time, and then the customer is more likely to say, ‘Okay, I will accept that’,” says Papadas.
The software, which is used by 1,000 Vodafone staff each day, also warns agents if they are at risk of going over budget by offering customers too many generous deals.
Vodafone’s deployment means that for the first time, it has a record in one database of the behaviour of its customers, which means the company can look at its transactions with each customer, across every channel, and see what messages have been sent to the customer and how they responded.
Real-time offers
Vodafone already has the ability to monitor when a customer looks at renewing their mobile phone contract, or look at deals for, say, mobile phones or TV packages – information that is fed into Pega in real time.
The next step is to offer customers real-time offers and notifications. For example, a customer looking at broadband TV packages on Vodafone’s website could receive a text or email offer to have the Disney channel included for less than the cost of buying the two packages separately.
“If you are looking at the retail price, we can come back to you with an offer which is better most of the time,” says Papadas.
“It’s about the right timing, relevance and contacting you at the right time. The offer arrives at your app, and you can activate it there and then.”
Vodafone also plans to deploy Adobe Analytics. It’s a powerful tool, he says, because, rather than messaging large volumes of customers with general offers, customers will receive targeted offers triggered by their activity on Vodafone’s website or app.
The company also has plans to harness the artificial intelligence capabilities in Pega to help it refine marketing campaigns.
Pega’s “adaptive” technology is able to “read” the behaviour of customers and “score the probability of the customer accepting the offer”.
The system gradually learns how to make small improvements to campaigns when it has enough data.
For example, Vodafone found that in one campaign, by changing its marketing strategy, it was able to make an average of 70 cents more on each sale. But with sales of this particular product line running to 10,000 a month, small improvements can add up.
Vodafone Greece also has plans to move its Pega operations from Google’s cloud platform to Pega’s cloud service, Pega Infinity, providing Vodafone with better support from Pega.
Learning from suppliers
One thing Papadas says he would do differently is have a stricter agreement with its implementation partner, Accenture, to make it clearer that Accenture’s role included training Vodafone staff as the project rolled out.
“If I was about to turn the time back, Vodafone teams would be fully included in the delivery plan, so it would be more or less a joint delivery,” he says.
Papadas says he would advise other IT professionals carrying out similar projects with a supplier, to make sure they learn from the supplier as quickly as possible.
“It’s very good to have a vendor because their expertise is essential, but make sure you learn as fast as you can from the vendor, both technically as well as [learning] the whole ecosystem to take it in-house, because then you have the power in your hands,” he says.
There is an inevitable conflict of interest with using suppliers to train in-house employees in the services they offer, says Papadas. “It’s difficult for vendors to bring the knowledge in-house because they want to sell to you; they want you to rely on them,” he adds. “I don’t blame them. I know how this works.”
How to get buy-in
Papadas says it’s important to involve people who are going to be impacted by the project together, including business experts, technology experts and the people who will be using Pega’s Customer Decision Hub to run campaigns.
“If you don’t have the people right from the beginning involved in designing, giving their input and saying what works for them, what doesn’t work for them, then it’s more difficult to get people on board,” he says.
It’s also important to have at least one person at the executive level to act as an enabler for the project, to keep the project team accountable for meeting deadlines and budgets, and most importantly to act as an “unblocker” when the project runs into hurdles.
In the case of Papadas, an executive responsible for commercial growth and Vodafone’s IT directors acted as high-level sponsors.
“Those two people were in every single review, in every point meeting to assist us or put us under the spotlight if we or the supplier were delayed,” he says. “Those two people were critical. Without them it would be more difficult to deliver.”
Vodafone held weekly reviews with the leadership team to review the project plan, what had been delivered, what had not been delivered, and what the challenges and obstacles were.
“We engaged all sides to ensure not only are they kept up to date on where their money, effort and people are, but also to assist us if there were problems,” says Papadas.
Mu is not the only comedian who has tried to imitate the style of AI-generated videos, but he really nails all of the elements: The clumsy bodily movements, the spaced-out facial expressions, and the unpredictable plot development. Many viewers, me included, were shocked at how accurately he captured the essence of AI slop videos.
Mu tells me that the half-dozen AI imitation videos he has filmed represent only a small part of his acting career. He has wanted to be an actor since college and spent the summer after his freshman year at Hengdian World Studios—the world’s largest film studio—looking for background acting opportunities. He started making comedy sketches on Chinese social media in 2019, and content creation now takes up most of his time.
The success of his AI imitation videos earned him a sponsorship deal from a Chinese generative AI company, which paid him 80,000 RMB (about $11,000) to produce two more sketches promoting the company’s video model. That’s not a bad gig, but I honestly expected Mu to have received more opportunities through his global virality.
As part of the sponsorship, Mu shot two versions of the sketches, one that embedded AI-generated footage and one without it. He was secretly hoping that the advertiser would choose the latter, because it showcases human acting skills front and center. But the advertiser chose the one with the AI. “That kind of feels like it’s starting to steal jobs from human actors, doesn’t it?” Mu says.
Mu popped up on my timeline again last week when he released a sequel to his first AI imitation series, this time mimicking the videos created by Sora, OpenAI’s latest generative video tool. His new video is much more subtle but still manages to nail that unexplainably unsettling feeling that has endured even as AI videos become more advanced.
Mu says there is a perpetual battle underway as AI accelerates, but it’s not man versus machine. Rather, the clash is between humans and other humans who make AI models, and each side is constantly trying to one up the other. “We’re poking fun at some of AI’s flaws, its eeriness and absurdity, but the AI creators are probably improving those, too. You see, this year’s AI already looks much more human,” Mu says.
How to Act Like AI
Before he made his first AI imitation sketch in July 2024, Mu watched a lot of AI slop videos to study their common traits. He wanted to understand the kinds of mistakes AI often makes and then re-create them in his own scripts.
For example, when an object appears in the frame, AI often misunderstands its purpose for being there. For example, a hanger can be used to hang clothes, but it’s also often the weapon of choice when parents in China physically punish their children. That dual use inspired another one of Mu’s videos last year, where midway through pretending to hit his “son” with a hanger, the boy’s shorts mysteriously come off, and Mu looks like he suddenly forgot what he’s doing and decided to hang up the shorts instead.
Compare the Best Hearing Aids
How Much Do Hearing Aids Cost?
How much money should you expect to spend on a hearing aid? The answer depends primarily on whether you’re looking into over-the-counter or prescription hearing aids. Unsurprisingly, the latter is a wallet guzzler, with average costs between $2,000 to $8,000. But OTCs can ring up quite a tab in their own right, and our most highly rated devices will still run you about $800 to $2,000 a pair. So far, we haven’t found an OTC device under this $800 price that is truly effective at treating hearing loss. In most cases, the $100 budget devices now flooding the market are too good to be true.
Fortunately, there are several methods to manage the high cost of a hearing aid:
Financing is available for virtually all reputable hearing aid companies, so you may not need to pay everything up front. Some plans are offered directly through the company, while others may require a third-party financing company like Klarna or Care Credit.
If you are over the age of 65, you may qualify for an add-on Medicare Advantage Plan (Part C) that may include hearing-related benefits. Most private insurance providers don’t offer hearing exam and device coverage, though some may have the option to add it as a supplemental benefit.
Medicaid coverage in certain states also pays for hearing aids, provided the prescription brand accepts it. Veterans may also qualify for hearing aid coverage through their VA benefits.
Some state governments have programs to help their constituents front the costs of hearing aids. Call or write to your state department to see whether this is a service they offer.
About Medicare and Insurance
Much like how it does not cover eyeglasses, Medicare does not cover hearing aids. That said, supplemental plans may include hearing benefits: Medicare Advantage Part C plans and many private insurance plans offer some hearing support, but coverage varies widely, so check with your provider before making that appointment. (Many states mandate that private insurance plans cover hearing aids, but a number of these are restricted to coverage for children.) On the plus side, standard Medicare plans (Parts A and B) do cover the cost of a hearing exam, but only with a doctor’s referral.
Many hearing aid providers are now providing financing for their products, usually at very low interest rates that let you pay for the product over up to three years. Medicaid may also help offset the cost of hearing aids, as may employer FSA and HSA plans.
How to Buy a Hearing Aid
There are two primary ways to buy a hearing aid: through a medical professional (the prescription route) or over-the-counter. Each has its pros and cons.
Prescription hearing aids are usually acquired through an audiologist. These specialists operate businesses ranging from sophisticated medical centers to small shops in a strip mall, usually emblazoned with a sign that reads “HEARING AIDS.” Again, this was the only way to acquire a hearing aid before 2022. An audiologist provides full service for your hearing aid from start to finish. They will test your hearing in a specialized room, physically examine your ears for medical problems, and suggest a hearing aid model. They will tune your chosen hearing aids and adjust them over time if things don’t sound right. The catch? Prescription hearing aids are expensive, anywhere from two to 10 times costlier than over-the-counter models. That said, for consumers who need hand-holding and significant fine-tuning of their hearing aids, professionals like this still have a function.
Over-the-counter aids can be bought through retailers online or offline, just like you would buy, say, a laptop computer. Different vendors offer different levels of presales support, and as the price of an OTC hearing aid goes up, you can usually expect a higher level of service. This may start with an online hearing test delivered to you via your computer or phone; these are not as good as an in-person test, but some can be surprisingly accurate. You may also get access to a remote audiologist who can meet with you over a video chat and fine-tune your hearing aid settings over the air. Ultimately, higher-end OTC aids offer a user experience similar to that of prescription aids, only one that is fully remote. At the low end of the hearing aid spectrum, you may get no service and support at all.
What Are the Different Types of Hearing Loss?
Medically speaking, there are three types of hearing loss. These are:
- Conductive: Hearing loss related to the outer or middle ear.
- Sensorineural: Hearing loss related to the inner ear.
- Mixed: A combination of both.
All of these types of hearing loss can occur due to a variety of factors. Genetics and aging are two of the biggest and most universal: The older you get, the more the sensitive organs inside your ears begin to break down, and this can happen especially early and/or rapidly if you have a family history of hearing loss. The other all-too-common cause for hearing loss is exposure to loud noises, and it doesn’t take much. Many people exposed to prolonged, loud noises like concerts, industrial equipment, motorcycle engines, and sirens experience a gradual hearing loss due to the slow death of tiny hair cells in the inner ear. However, sudden exposure to very loud sounds like explosions and gunshots can cause instantaneous, irreversible damage by rupturing the eardrum (or worse).
There’s no easy way to know which type of hearing loss you have unless you’ve experienced some type of acute damage that has brought on a sudden change in your hearing. Whatever you suspect, it’s important you see a medical doctor to diagnose the issue fully.
Sensorineural is the most common type of hearing loss, and it can be caused by any of the aforementioned issues and more. Sensorineural hearing loss is permanent and can not be reversed, but it can be alleviated through the use of hearing aids. An audiologist can develop an audiogram for you that will show you how severe your hearing loss is and advise on what types of hearing aids might be best for treating it.
Conversely, conductive hearing loss is more medically treatable. This type of hearing loss is often due to a physical obstruction such as a buildup of earwax or fluid, or even physical damage to the eardrum. In these cases, a physician must examine the ear to determine the best course of treatment.
Degrees of Hearing Loss
The primary levels of hearing loss look like this, as defined by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA):
I configured and qualitatively tested each device in several settings, including my home, outdoors, and crowded environments, to see how well they helped treat my mild hearing loss while more deeply evaluating the user experience. I tried charging rechargeable models, changing batteries if disposable, connecting Bluetooth features, and cleaning the devices. I also compared them based on overall look and style—style matters.
Other Hearing Aids to Consider
We’ve reviewed dozens of hearing aids, and many of them are good but not great. Here are alternatives to consider:
GN ReSound Vivia for $5,000+: ReSound’s new Vivia line of prescription hearing aids are on par in both design (at a svelte 2.56 grams) and quality with the Starkey Edge AI models, providing a pristine audio experience that is tuned perfectly and utterly free of hiss and feedback. The “intelligence-augmented” devices work well in either noise or more intimate one-on-one settings, and GN’s Smart 3D app couldn’t be easier to master. Support for Bluetooth Auracast is also included, so wearers can now pipe media (like the audio from the TV at a bar) directly to the aids. They aren’t cheap, so getting some advance ears-on time with them is essential for prospective buyers.
Phonak Virto R Infinio for $4,000: Phonak’s Virto R Infinio (8/10, WIRED Recommends) and pricey prescription hearing aids like the GN ReSound above, but they have a custom fit process that helps make them some of the best-fitting hearing aids on the market. They’re immensely comfortable to wear for long periods, and you’ll get pretty good audio quality for in-the-ear hearing aids. It’s just a shame there’s no battery in the charging case to extend the run time.
Sony CRE-E10 for $898: The CRE-E10 (7/10, WIRED Review) aren’t so much of an upgrade to the C20 we recommend above, but a different class of product. They’re much more visible, though they look like a standard pair of Bluetooth earbuds. The E10 provide a comfortable fit but can get tiring after a long day. At least they use a rechargeable battery (via USB-C) with up to 26 hours on a single charge. You can control them only through Sony’s app, and the hearing test lets you tune the frequency response of the aids. The audio experience is excellent at low volumes, though these aids have a bit of an echo and some additional noise. Still, I found it manageable. They do a decent job streaming media and calls via Bluetooth.
Eargo 8 for $2,499: The Eargo 8 (6/10, WIRED Review) offer high-quality sound in a tiny package that’s nearly invisible. There are a few listening programs you can cycle through, but I didn’t find the need to switch modes—they provided well-amplified audio no matter what I was doing. Battery life is excellent, but the poor app control functions and lack of Bluetooth streaming make them a tough sell, especially considering the absurdly high price. That’s almost the same problem I had with their predecessor, the Eargo 7 (7/10, WIRED Review).
Audien Hearing Atom X for $389: The most interesting feature of Audien’s Atom X (6/10, WIRED Review) is the case—there’s an embedded display that lets you tweak volume and change modes, no need to use an app or fuss with buttons. Audien has also reduced the hiss from these affordable buds. Unfortunately, the hearing aids aren’t tunable and provide blunt amplification, so you can’t shape the frequencies to where you need the most help. I suggest trying a pair of AirPods Pro 3 first.
Avoid These Hearing Aids
Just as important as what hearing aids to buy are what hearing aids not to buy. While some of these devices are affordable, most are lacking in quality or style. After our testing, we don’t wholly recommend these hearing aids. (Poor hearing aids can harm your hearing.)
Audien Atom One for $98: I had high hopes for these, but they’re impossibly cheap. The Atom One (5/10, WIRED Review) come up short on smart features, as there’s no way to fine-tune these devices.
Elehear Beyond Pro for $599: There are improvements here in audio quality over the older Elehear Beyond, but the core problem with the Beyond Pro (6/10, WIRED Review) hearing aids is that they’re just too bulky and uncomfortable to wear. They also come with a price hike that’s tough to swallow.
Lexie Lumen for $299: These are comically large and dated. The case was physically falling apart during testing, which I wouldn’t expect from hearing aids at this price. Though they sound fine, they’re far from subtle and were plagued with connectivity bugs.
Olive Union Olive Max for $447: The Olive Max (6/10, WIRED Review) are big and look like a Bluetooth headset from the early 2000s (except for both of your ears). You can use an app to fine-tune the listening experience, but the overall hearing aid performance was mixed, and I experienced a steady, buzzing background noise. They were pretty unusable in loud environments, too. That said, they work well as standard wireless earbuds.
Ceretone Core One for $350: The mandatory app required to control the Ceretone Core One (5/10, WIRED Review) hearing aids is so basic that it’s useless. You can’t tune the frequencies, and the listening experience is quite blunt. They’re also not comfortable to wear for long periods.
Ceretone Core One Pro for $390: The Core One Pro (5/10, WIRED Review) change things up so much that they’re no longer compatible with Ceretone’s app. Instead, you’ll control them through the buttons on the case. Unfortunately, you still can’t tune them to an audiogram, so they amplify everything bluntly, and they’re not very effective as hearing aids.
MDHearing Neo for $297 and Neo XS for $297: Never mind the Joe Namath endorsement, these in-ear aids are incredibly uncomfortable and feature a wildly dated design sensibility. Screeching feedback at the slightest touch makes them untenable for even short-term use.
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Researchers at Texas A&M University have developed the first known metallic gel. Unlike everyday gels, like those used in hand sanitizers, hair products or soft contact lenses, this new material is made entirely of metals and can withstand extreme heat. The discovery could be a game changer for energy storage.
The work is published in Advanced Engineering Materials.
The gel is created by mixing two metal powders. When heated, one metal melts into a liquid, while the other stays solid and forms a microscopic scaffold. The liquid metal remains trapped inside this structure, creating a gel-like material that looks solid but contains liquid within.
Everyday gels are semi-solid materials containing an organic backbone holding liquids in place at room temperature. Unlike them, metallic gels require very high temperatures, which, depending on the metals used, can be around 1,000 degrees Celsius or 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Metallic gels have never been reported before, probably because no one thought liquid metals could be supported by an internal ultrafine skeleton,” said Dr. Michael J. Demkowicz, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who led the research.
“What’s surprising in this case is that when the majority component—copper—was melted into liquid, it didn’t just collapse into a puddle. That’s what pure copper would have done,” he explained.
Metallic gels made from highly reactive metals with strong electrical attraction, known as electronegativity, can be used as electrodes in liquid metal batteries (LMBs). In simple terms, these metals are very reactive and easily bond with other materials, which helps the battery work efficiently.
LMBs are special types of batteries that store and release large amounts of electrical energy. Instead of using solid materials like most batteries, they use layers of liquid metal. Because the parts are liquid, they do not wear out as quickly as regular batteries.
So far, LMBs have mainly been used in large stationary systems, such as backup power for building applications that need to keep running during a power outage. They have not been used in moving systems because the liquid inside shifts when the battery moves. This can cause a short circuit, which means the battery loses electrical power.
That is where metallic gel electrodes come in. By holding the liquid metal in place, they could make it possible to use LMBs in things that move, such as powering large ships or heavy industrial vehicles that can safely handle the heat of these batteries.
To test the idea, researchers built a small lab version of the battery using two cube-shaped electrodes. One was made from a mix of liquid calcium and solid iron, which acted as the anode, and the other from liquid bismuth and iron, which acted as the cathode.
When placed in a molten salt, a hot liquid that allows electrical charge to flow between the two, the battery worked successfully. It produced electricity, and the mostly liquid electrodes stayed in shape and kept working as intended.
The research was performed by a team led by Demkowicz and doctoral student Charles Borenstein, who is the first author on the paper.
Demkowicz and Borenstein said that what began as an exploration of the behaviors of metal composites of copper and tantalum resulted in this serendipitous discovery.
“We were just exploring different methods of processing composites by heat,” Demkowicz said. “All we wanted to do, at first, was to see: Does this even survive until one of the components melts?”
Borenstein originally put a composite of 25% tantalum and 75% copper into the furnace heated to copper’s melting point.
“Nothing happened, which I found kind of confusing,” he said, noting that the copper didn’t run out and pool. “We were pretty surprised by these results.”
After testing other percentages of both metals, he found that any combination of the metals with a volume of tantalum above 18 percent still retained the gel form.
The next step was to bring the new structure to a lab with a very high-resolution micro-CT scanner to examine the metallic gel’s interior. Although copper and tantalum are not ideal candidates for electrodes, they are for CT scanning. As anticipated, the tantalum formed a solid scaffolding structure holding the liquid copper within its lacunae.
That’s when the team shifted their research to the battery materials of iron, bismuth and calcium, and demonstrated the feasibility of the metallic gel LMB.
Demkowicz said that an LMB made for transportable applications could also employ a gel-like composite electrolyte, such as a molten salt supported by a ceramic backbone, through which the electrode’s ions could pass.
He highlighted other potential applications for LMBs, including one that he said would be especially exciting to work on: powering a hypersonic vehicle, like those under feasibility study at the Texas A&M University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics. Hypersonic vehicles operate at extremely high temperatures and could theoretically be powered by a very hot LMB.
Co-authors on the paper are Dr. Brady G. Butler and Dr. James D. Paramore, visiting professors at Texas A&M, and Dr. Karl T. Hartwig, professor emeritus at the university.
The high-resolution CT scanning was performed at the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility in Austin.
More information:
Charles Borenstein et al, Shape‐Preserving Metallic Gels with Applications as Electrodes for Liquid Metal Batteries, Advanced Engineering Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adem.202500738
Citation:
Pure metallic gel opens door to more powerful liquid metal batteries (2025, October 23)
retrieved 23 October 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-pure-metallic-gel-door-powerful.html
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