#Floating wind turbines bring electricity where it#s needed It a balloon that lifts a wind turbine. That the easiest way to describe the technology being developed by Altaeros Energies,
led by Ben Glass, inventor and CEO of the young company. Glass has reimagined the possibilities of balloon
and airship technology to lift a wind turbine. Most wind turbine manufacturers are competing to build taller turbines to harness more powerful winds above 500 feet,
or 150 meters. Altaeros is going much higher with their novel Buoyant Airborne Turbine: the BAT.
The Altaeros BAT can reach 2, 000 feet, or 600 meters. Credit: Altaeros Energies Most wind turbine manufacturers are competing to build taller turbines to harness more powerful winds above 500 feet,
or 150 meters. Altaeros is going much higher with their novel Buoyant Airborne Turbine: the BAT.
The Altaeros BAT can reach 2, 000 feet, or 600 meters. Credit: Altaeros Energies Aiming high Most wind turbine manufacturers are competing to build taller turbines to harness more powerful winds above 500 feet,
or 150 meters. Altaeros is going much higher with their novel Buoyant Airborne Turbinehe BAT.
The Altaeros BAT can reach 2, 000 feet, or 600 meters. At this altitude, wind speeds are faster
As a result, the BAT can generate more than twice the energy of a similarly rated tower-mounted turbine.
The BAT key enabling technologies include a novel aerodynamic design, custom-made composite materials and an innovative control system.
The helium-inflatable shell channels wind through a lightweight wind turbine. The shell self-stabilizes and produces aerodynamic lift, in addition to buoyancy.
Multiple high-strength tethers hold the BAT in place and a single conductive tether transmits power to a mobile ground station.
Remote customers typically pay over $0. 30/kwh USD for electricity. The BAT has the potential to bring affordable wind energy to these communities and industries.
The first model will provide enough electricity for a small community, or about a dozen American homes.
Credit: Altaeros Energies Remote customers typically pay over $0. 30/kwh USD for electricity. The BAT has the potential to bring affordable wind energy to these communities and industries.
The first model will provide enough electricity for a small community, or about a dozen American homes.
Credit: Altaeros Energies The BAT automated control system ensures safe and efficient operation, the highlight of which is the capability to adjust altitude autonomously for optimal power output.
The first BAT model is approximately 15 by 15 meters, is containerized, and does not require a crane or foundation for installation.
Reaching customers Diesel generators are the standard in power generation for rural and off-grid areas.
and diesel generators, though inexpensive to install, are expensive to operate and maintain. As a result, remote customers typically pay more than 30 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity.
The BAT has the potential to bring affordable wind energy to these communities and industries. The first model will provide enough electricity for a small community,
or about a dozen American homes. Combined with significant increases in energy output and the ability to install the unit in 24 hours,
the BAT substantially reduces the cost of energy and time to reach customersenergy needs. In the future, Altaeros expects to deploy the BAT alongside first responders in emergency response situations
when access to the electric grid is unavailable. Much like other tethered balloons, the Altaeros BAT can lift communication,
Internet and sensory equipment alongside the turbine to provide additional services for customers. The addition of payload equipment does not affect the BAT performance.
Scaling up Altaeros was founded in 2010 at the Massachusetts institute of technology. The company has received NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants Phase
I and Phase II) to test a novel low-cost, high-performance fabric suitable for the BAT shell,
and to develop its modular wind turbine for power performance and ease of installation. Altaeros recently received Series A funding of $7 million dollars for the continued development and commercialization of its technology. he new products being developed by the team at Altaeros are exciting
because they have the potential to offer a new method for energy generation which is portable, reliable,
quick to deploy, and environmentally-friendly, said Ben Schrag, NSF SBIR program director. his technology has the potential to avoid many of the key challenges facing traditional wind turbines. i
#Laser-induced graphene#super#for electronics Rice university scientists advanced their recent development of laser-induced graphene (LIG) by producing
and testing stacked, three-dimensional supercapacitors, energy storage devices that are important for portable, flexible electronics. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour discovered last year that firing a laser at an inexpensive polymer burned off other elements and left a film of porous graphene, the much-studied atom-thick
lattice of carbon. The researchers viewed the porous, conductive material as a perfect electrode for supercapacitors or electronic circuits.
To prove it, members of the Tour group have extended since their work to make vertically aligned supercapacitors with laser-induced graphene on both sides of a polymer sheet.
The sections are stacked then with solid electrolytes in between for a multilayer sandwich with multiple microsupercapacitors.
The flexible stacks show excellent energy storage capacity and power potential and can be scaled up for commercial applications.
LIG can be made in air at ambient temperature, perhaps in industrial quantities through roll-to-roll processes,
Tour said. The research was reported this week in Applied materials and Interfaces. Capacitors use an electrostatic charge to store energy they can release quickly, to a camera flash, for example.
Unlike chemical-based rechargeable batteries, capacitors charge fast and release all their energy at once when triggered.
But chemical batteries hold far more energy. Supercapacitors combine useful qualities of both the fast charge/discharge of capacitors and high-energy capacity of batteries into one package.
LIG supercapacitors appear able to do all that with the added benefits of flexibility and scalability.
The flexibility ensures they can easily conform to varied packages they can be rolled within a cylinder,
for instance without giving up any of the device performance. hat wee made are comparable to microsupercapacitors being commercialized now,
but our ability to put devices into a 3-D configuration allows us to pack a lot of them into a very small area,
Ripples, wrinkles and sub-10-nanometer pores in the surface and atomic-level imperfections give LIG its ability to store a lot of energy.
-and-release characteristics of a supercapacitor. In testing, the researchers charged and discharged the devices for thousands of cycles with almost no loss of capacitance.
To show how well their supercapacitors scale up for applications, the researchers wired pairs of each variety of device in serial and parallel.
The vertical supercapacitors showed almost no change in electrical performance when flexed, even after 8, 000 bending cycles.
while thin-film lithium ion batteries are able to store more energy, LIG supercapacitors of the same size offer three times the performance in power (the speed at which energy flows).
And the LIG devices can easily scale up for increased capacity. ee demonstrated that these are going to be excellent components of the flexible electronics that will soon be embedded in clothing and consumer goods,
he said. Rice graduate student Zhiwei Peng and previous postdoctoral researcher Jian Lin, now an assistant professor at University of Missouri, are co-lead authors of the paper.
Co-authors are Rice graduate students Ruquan Ye and Errol Samuel. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of materials science and nanoengineering and of computer science and a member of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
The Air force Office of Scientific research and its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) and the Office of Naval Research MURI supported the research e
#Carbon nanotube finding could lead to flexible electronics with longer battery life University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers have made a significant leap toward creating higher-performance electronics with improved battery life and the ability to flex
and stretch. Led by materials science Associate professor Michael Arnold and Professor Padma Gopalan, the team has reported the highest-performing carbon nanotube transistors ever demonstrated.
In addition to paving the way for improved consumer electronics, this technology could also have specific uses in industrial and military applications.
In a paper published recently in the journal ACS Nano, Arnold Gopalan and their students reported transistors with an on-off ratio that 1, 000 times better and a conductance that 100 times better than previous state-of-the-art carbon nanotube transistors. arbon nanotubes are very strong and very flexible,
so they could also be used to make flexible displays and electronics that can stretch and bend, allowing you to integrate electronics into new places like clothing,
says Arnold. he advance enables new types of electronics that aren possible with the more brittle materials manufacturers are currently using.
Carbon nanotubes are single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. As some of the best electrical conductors ever discovered
carbon nanotubes have long been recognized as a promising material for next-generation transistors, which are semiconductor devices that can act like an on-off switch for current
or amplify current. This forms the foundation of an electronic device. However, researchers have struggled to isolate purely semiconducting carbon nanotubes,
which are crucial, because metallic nanotube impurities act like copper wires and hortthe device. Researchers have struggled also to control the placement and alignment of nanotubes.
Until now, these two challenges have limited the development of high-performance carbon nanotube transistors. Building on more than two decades of carbon nanotube research in the field
the UW-Madison team drew on cutting-edge technologies that use polymers to selectively sort out the semiconducting nanotubes,
achieving a solution of ultra-high-purity semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Previous techniques to align the nanotubes resulted in less than-desirable packing density,
or how close the nanotubes are to one another when they are assembled in a film. However, the UW-Madison researchers pioneered a new technique,
called floating evaporative self-assembly, or FESA, which they described earlier in 2014 in the ACS journal Langmuir.
In that technique, researchers exploited a self-assembly phenomenon triggered by rapidly evaporating a carbon nanotube solution.
The team most recent advance also brings the field closer to realizing carbon nanotube transistors as a feasible replacement for silicon transistors in computer chips and in high-frequency communication devices,
which are rapidly approaching their physical scaling and performance limits. he advance enables new types of electronics that aren possible with the more brittle materials manufacturers are currently using.
Michael Arnold his is not an incremental improvement in performance, Arnold says. ith these results,
wee really made a leap in carbon nanotube transistors. Our carbon nanotube transistors are an order of magnitude better in conductance than the best thin film transistor technologies currently being used commercially
while still switching on and off like a transistor is supposed to function. The researchers have patented their technology through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
and have begun working with companies to accelerate the technology transfer to industry. The work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation,
as well as grants from the UW-Madison Center of Excellence for Materials Research and Innovation, the U s army Research Office, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program,
and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Additional authors on the ACS Nano paper include UW-Madison materials science and engineering graduate students Gerald Brady, Yongho Joo and Matthew Shea,
and electrical and computer engineering graduate student Meng-Yin Wu r
#Fujitsu develops ring-type wearable device capable of text input by fingertip Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced the development of a compact and lightweight wearable ring-type device that offers handwriting-input
functionality and a reader for near-field communications (NFC) tags. Wearable devices have been making inroads into the workplace in recent years notably with head-mounted displays (HMDS) in line with putting ICT to use so as to not stop
what they are doing. But HMDS do not make it easy to select displayed information such as yes
or no to input figures make notes on workplace conditions or perform other necessary actions.
The ring-type wearable device that Fujitsu Laboratories developed identifies the fingertip movements users make as they write in the air
and recognizes that tracing as a letterform. By writing in the air with ones fingertip operators can select menu options
or make memos on photos that they take in the field. By applying proprietary technology that corrects the letterform tracings Fujitsu Laboratories has been able to improve character recognition accuracy enabling recognition of everything from numbers to Chinese characters.
Furthermore with a built-in NFC tag reader operators can specify an object to be worked on with a touch on its NFC tag
and display an operations details. As data from the object to be worked on can be selected easily in a hands-free manner the performance of maintenance
and other tasks is expected to be more efficient. With modern advances in the miniaturization of smart devices communications technology and cloud environments there is interest in using HMDS
and other wearable devices for maintenance and other tasks in factories and buildings where ICT can be put to use to free up hands for operations.
Because operators do need not to hold devices in their hands to receive information in the field there are especially high expectations for the use of such wearable devices in fieldwork for
which operators need use of their hands at all times. With display devices such as HMDS it is possible to browse information without taking out a separate smart device.
Users can therefore receive information without occupying their hands. The problem however is that it is difficult to manipulate the information received.
Entering numbers or taking notes has required either a separate device or a notepad forcing the operator to interrupt the task at hand.
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a lightweight and compact device wearable as a ring that makes it easy to draw letterforms in the air as a way to select displayed content
and take notes. Despite being ring-sized the device includes motion sensors for text input an NFC tag reader and wireless communication functionality.
Key features of the technology are as follows. The ring-type wearable device can be used to enter numbers
This technology allows operators to manipulate data without stopping what they are doing and with a minimum of movement even while holding other tools.
Successfully fighting off an infection depends on the interactions between these cells. A new device developed by MIT engineers offers a much more detailed picture of that cellular communication.
and collects data on each as they interact with each other the researchers have learned already more about how T cells major players in the immune response become activated during infection.
The device is based on microfluidic technology developed by Joel Voldman an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) in 2009.
and a graduate student in EECS spent several years re-engineering the device to get it to work with immune cells which are much smaller than the cells analyzed in 2009.
Hidde Ploegh an MIT professor of biology and member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is also a senior author of the paper.
The device consists of a chip with cell-trapping cups that are arranged strategically to capture
This technique allows the researchers to follow hundreds of cell pairs over time and monitor
and when they turn on a type of protein signaling known as phosphorylation. his is a very elegant way of doing these experimentssays Hang Lu a professor of chemical
and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of technology who was involved not in the research. t very well-controlled
and display pieces of viral or bacterial proteins (known as antigens) on their cell surfaces. When these B cells encounter T cells with receptors that recognize the antigen the T cells become activated provoking them to release cytokines inflammatory chemicals that control the immune response
or to seek out and destroy infected cells. Although all of the T cells in this study had identical T cell receptors the MIT team found that they did not all respond the same way after encountering B cells carrying identical antigens on their surfaces.
Using calcium imaging to measure T cell activation the researchers found that the initial activation level depends on how much of the antigen is presented.
At high levels most of the cells respond the same way. However at lower antigen levels the T cell responses vary greatly.
These differences also correlated to differences in T cell cytokine production. In future studies the researchers hope to further trace how T cells go through the decision-making process that determines their eventual fates.
and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body. The study was led by Nenad Bursac associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke university
and Lauran Madden a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac laboratory. It appears January 13 in the open-access journal elife. he beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dishsaid Bursac. e are working to test drugsefficacy
and safety without jeopardizing a patient health and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseasesspecially rare ones
and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult. ursac and Madden started with a small sample of human cells that had progressed already beyond stem cells
but hadn yet become muscle tissue. They expanded these yogenic precursorsby more than a 1000-fold
and media to make this work with human muscle cellssaid Madden. Madden subjected the new muscle to a barrage of tests to determine how closely it resembled native tissue inside a human body.
To see if the muscle could be used as a proxy for medical tests Bursac and Madden studied its response to a variety of drugs including statins used to lower cholesterol
The statins had a dose-dependent response causing abnormal fat accumulation at high concentrations. Clenbuterol showed a narrow beneficial window for increased contraction.
Both of these effects have been documented in humans. Clenbuterol does not harm muscle tissue in rodents at those doses showing the lab-grown muscle was giving a truly human response. ne of our goals is to use this method to provide personalized medicine to patientssaid Bursac. e can take a biopsy from each patient grow many
new muscles to use as test samples and experiment to see which drugs would work best for each person. his goal may not be far away;
Bursac is already working on a study with clinicians at Duke Medicinencluding Dwight Koeberl associate professor of pediatricso try to correlate efficacy of drugs in patients with the effects on lab-grown muscles.
Bursac#s group is also trying to grow contracting human muscles using induced pluripotent stem cells instead of biopsied cells. here are a some diseases like Duchenne Muscular dystrophy for example that make taking muscle biopsies difficultsaid Bursac. f
and never have to bother the patient again. ther investigators involved in this study include George Truskey the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Biomedical engineering and senior associate dean for research for the Pratt School of engineering and William Krauss
professor of biomedical engineering medicine and nursing at Duke university. The research was supported by NIH Grants R01ar055226 and R01ar065873 from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin disease and UH2TR000505 from the NIH Common Fund for the Microphysiological Systems Initiative.
Source: Duke university By Ken Kinger n
##Single-photon emission enhancement#seen as step toward quantum technologies Researchers have demonstrated a new way to enhance the emission of single photons by using yperbolic metamaterials,
a step toward creating devices in work aimed at developing quantum computers and communications technologies. Optical metamaterials harness clouds of electrons called surface plasmons to manipulate
and control light. Purdue University researchers had created previously uperlatticesfrom layers of the metal titanium nitride and the dielectric,
or insulator, aluminum scandium nitride. Unlike some of the plasmonic components under development, which rely on the use of noble metals such as gold and silver,
the new metamaterial is compatible with the complementary metalxideemiconductor manufacturing process used to construct integrated circuits.
The metamaterial is said to be hyperbolic, meaning it possesses unique properties leading to the increased output of light.
In new findings the researchers have demonstrated how attaching nanodiamonds containing itrogen-vacancy centersto the new metamaterial further enhances the production of single photons, workhorses of quantum information processing,
which could bring superior computers, cryptography and communications technologies. hese results indicate that the brightness of the nanodiamond-based single-photon emitter could be enhanced substantially by placing such an emitter on the surface of the hyperbolic metamaterial,
said Alexander Kildishev, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. he single-photon emitters could be used to build highly efficient room temperature CMOS-compatible single-photon sources.
Research findings are detailed in a cover paper appearing in the Jan 15 issue of Laser & Photonics Reviews.
The work was a collaboration of researchers from Purdue, the Russian Quantum Center, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Lebedev Physical Institute,
and Photonic Nano-Meta Technologies Inc. A nitrogen-vacancy center is an atomic-scale defect formed in the diamond lattice by substituting a nitrogen atom for a carbon atom
and creating a neighboring void in the lattice. Placing a nanodiamond containing an NV center on the surface of hyperbolic metamaterials not only enhances the emission of photons,
but also changes the pattern of light emitted, a trait that could be important for the development of quantum devices,
said graduate student Mikhail Y. Shalaginov, the paper lead author. He and Kildishev are working with a team of researchers led by Vladimir M. Shalaev, scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue Birck Nanotechnology Center and a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering,
and Alexandra Boltasseva, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Professors Shalaev, Kildishev and Boltasseva are a part of a Purdue reeminent teamworking on quantum photonics.
Because the studied system represents a stable source of single photons that functions at room temperature
it is potentially practical for commercial applications. When exposed to a laser light, the system rises from its round stateto an excited state,
which causes it to spontaneously emit a photon. e are interested in causing it to emit faster
Metamaterials have engineered surfaces that contain features, patterns or elements, such as tiny antennas or alternating layers of nitrides that enable unprecedented control of light.
Constructed of artificial atoms and molecules the optical metamaterials owe their unusual potential to precision engineering on the scale of nanometers.
Quantum computers would take advantage of phenomena described by quantum theory called uperpositionand ntanglement. Instead of only the states of one and zero that exist in conventional computers,
there are many possible uperposition quantum states. Computers based on quantum physics would have quantum bits, or ubits, increasing the computer capacity to process, store,
and transmit information. The nitrogen vacancy also makes it possible to potentially record information based on the nuclear or electron pinstate of the center,
which is promising for quantum computing. The spin can be either por ownforming the quantum superposition of the up and down states representing a new technology for processing information.
Future research may include work to improve the system with devices that combine the hyperbolic metamaterial with nanoantennas
and optical waveguides to increase its efficiency and make it more compact. The ongoing work also may strive to improve the pin propertiesof the system with nitrogen-vacancies
and to study the optical contrast between the up and down states e
#New catalyst process uses light not metal for rapid polymerization A team of chemistry and materials science experts from University of California,
Santa barbara and The Dow chemical Company has created a novel way to overcome one of the major hurdles preventing the widespread use of controlled radical polymerization.
In a global polymer industry valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, a technique called Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization is emerging as a key process for creating well-defined polymers for a vast range of materials, from adhesives to electronics.
However, current ATRP methods by design use metal catalysts a major roadblock to applications for which metal contamination is an issue,
such as materials used for biomedical purposes. This new method of radical polymerization doesn involve heavy metal catalysts like copper.
Their innovative, metal-free ATRP process uses an organic-based photocatalyst and light as the stimulus for the highly controlled chemical reaction. he grand challenge in ATRP has been:
How can we do this without any metals? said Craig Hawker, director of the Dow Materials Institute at UCSB. e looked toward developing an organic catalyst that is highly reducing in the excited state,
and we found it in an easily prepared catalyst, phenothiazine. t rop-intechnology for industry, said Javier Read de Alaniz,
principal investigator and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSB. eople are used already to the same starting materials for ATRP,
but now we have the ability to do it without copper. Copper, even at trace levels, is a problem for microelectronics because it acts as a conductor,
and for biological applications because of its toxicity to organisms and cells. Read de Alaniz Hawker, and postdoctoral researcher Brett Fors, now with Cornell University, led the study that was inspired initially by a photoreactive Iridium catalyst.
Their study was recently detailed in a paper titled etal-Free Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The research was made possible by support from Dow, a research partner of the UCSB College of Engineering.
ATRP is used already widely across dozens of major industries, but the new metal-free rapid polymerization process ushes controlled radical polymerization into new areas and new applications, according to Hawker. any processes in use today all start with ATRP.
Now this method opens doors for a new class of organic-based photoredox catalysts. Controlling radical polymerization processes is critical for the synthesis of functional block polymers.
As a catalyst, phenothiazine builds block copolymers in a sequential manner, achieving high chain-end fidelity.
This translates into a high degree of versatility in polymer structure, as well as an efficient process. ur process doesn need heat.
You can do this at room temperature with simple LED LIGHTS, said Hawker. ee had success with a range of vinyl monomers,
so this polymerization strategy is useful on many levels. he development of living radical processes,
such as ATRP, is arguably one of the biggest things to happen in polymer chemistry in the past few decades,
he added. his new discovery will significantly further the whole field. w
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