#Novel solar photovoltaic cells achieve record efficiency using nanoscale structures Here's how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus:
First, arrange microscopic flecks of gold on a semiconductor background. Using the gold as seeds,
Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity#a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.
#and validated at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar energy systems#this novel nanowire configuration delivered nearly as much electricity as more traditional indium phosphide thin-film solar cells
That suggests such nanowire solar cells could prove cheaper #and more powerful#if the process could be industrialized,
At the same time the novel cells could be built into so-called multijunction solar cells#compound devices that incorporate several different types of semiconductor material in layers like a sandwich to absorb as much of the energy in sunlight as possible.
Such multijunction cells have converted more than 43 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity#currently
Such multijunction solar cells are also the most expensive type of photovoltaic, but they can be made cheaper by combining them with low-cost lenses to concentrate the sunlight onto smaller versions of the cells.
Borgstr#m, for one, suspects that nanowire solar cells will stand on their own once the production process can be simplified,
such as ultra-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDS) and solar cells, but the technology has found mainly niche applications.
in particular their energy gap#the energy needed to kick electrons into a higher energy band#which determines the colour of light that the mater#ial can emit.
Quantum dots have shown promise for electronics, too#for example in solar cells in which a mix of quantum dots tuned to absorb different wavelengths of light could capture more of the energy in the solar spectrum.
But one hurdle to their exploitation was their temperature sensitivity. Near the backlight of a liquid-crystal display (LCD), for example, temperatures can be around 100#C. At this temperature,
to make them more appealing as long-life, low energy light bulbs. But Bawendi says that LED designs
Current atomic clocks are based on the microwave signals emitted by electrons inside an atom as they move from one energy level to another.
giving materials scientists a new tool for investigating the behaviour of light in the interiors of the complex nanostructures used in lasers, light-based circuits and solar cells."
and energy of the light (see Metamaterial TV). The device is sensitive enough to pick up a signal even from materials that are barely luminescent, such as metals.
The team has mapped also the distribution of light in the silicon nanodiscs that are used as a coating on solar cells to improve efficiency,
Lukas Novotny, an optical physicist at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Zurich, says that cathodoluminescence could be a useful tool for improving the performance of light-emitting devices and solar cells,
Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles.
which particles have no energy at all, and higher temperatures correspond to higher average energies. However, by the 1950s, physicists working with more exotic systems began to realise that this isn't always true:
Technically, you read off the temperature of a system from a graph that plots the probabilities of its particles being found with certain energies.
Normally, most particles have average or near-average energies, with only a few particles zipping around at higher energies.
In theory, if the situation is reversed, with more particles having higher, rather than lower energies, the plot would flip over
lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react, says Schneider."
Exotic high-energy states that are hard to generate in the laboratory at positive temperatures become stable at negative absolute temperatures#"as
Messing s animals formed persistent memories for fears, objects, places and movements across a battery of behavioral tests.
Hydrogen has a high energy density and is completely clean, burning to leave behind only water vapour as waste.
but proponents of a hydrogen economy say that it could be produced in vast quantities from water using excess electricity from wind turbines and solar plants.
and takes a lot of energy. Many chemists have spent decades studying how best to trap hydrogen for use as a fuel.
or hold onto the hydrogen so tightly that it takes an unfeasible amount of energy to retrieve.
It is difficult to estimate how much energy will be saved, says Beller. The process is still at an early stage, years away from commercialization.
But he thinks that it could be enough to make methanol a viable energy carrier
potentially delivering hydrogen for fuel cells in mobile phones, computers or even cars. Edman Tsang, a chemist at the University of Oxford, UK, who also works on storing hydrogen in liquids including methanol2,
That means that it may be possible to combine a methanol-hydrogen reaction with a fuel cell that guzzles up the gas to produce electricity.
hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as fuel cells that directly run on methanol, for instance. Not everyone agrees with Beller and Tsang.
batteries will be key to energy transport and to small-scale storage of electricity from solar panels. Long-term, large-scale storage of wind energy could best be achieved by simply storing compressed hydrogen underground.
But this year, the government offered some support for clean energy companies. Sustainable development Technology Canada, a foundation that supports clean technology startup companies, will get Can$325 million over 8 years.
This investment was welcomed by Clare Demerse, federal policy director at the Pembina Institute, an energy policy think tank in Calgary.
The Planck data also implies that dark energy makes up 68.3%of the energy density of the Universe,
but most require very low temperatures#otherwise, the electrons gather enough energy to tunnel through the semiconductor,
but is used in everything from stainless steel to rechargeable batteries. Rare-earth elements are concentrated much less at around 0. 1,
enhance battery technology and expand the use of biofuels, among other clean energy efforts. The ultimate goal:
The White house has argued that energy innovation is not only good for cutting carbon emissions to tame global warming,
and military leaders and enjoys support from Lisa Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Senate s Energy and Natural resources Committee.
as one administration official stated, is to"double down on the opportunities for achieving a cleaner-energy future.
the crust"would be the first major ecosystem On earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight,
but wonder how the amount of living biomass there compares to that at the Earth s surface, says Konhauser s
The fact that more accessible and more palatable, energy-rich foods engage POMC neurons and shut down Agrp activity more strongly suggests that the circuit also has nticipatoryaspects, by
likewise, since energy-dense foods alleviate hunger for longer periods, discovery of these foods should more strongly tamp down the hunger circuit
It Thync, a wearable device that zaps your brain with low levels of pulsed electrical energy to calm you down
me feeling a meditative calm and an inspired energy just as theye supposed to. The Thync System, founded by Jamie Tyler,
The energy mode provide his brain with more clarity. Thync is considered a lifestyle product, as opposed to a medical device,
T hose coils generate directional electromagnetic fields that cycle on and off, causing the robot to oscillate
an engineering professor at the University of Virginia, told Phys. org. e can transmit more data without using any additional energy.
The technology would require no more energy than is used currently to emit light. The light waves can carry data at 300 megabits per second from LED fixtures to wireless devices.
When hit with an electric charge, this special RF-C glows because of an electroluminescent paint. Which means that the faster you drive
which can be excited at two different energy levels. This produces luminescence at two separate wavelengths that have lifetimes ranging from 277 millionths of a second to about 100 billionths of a second.
Likewise, young blood can restore the memory and energy of older mice. Neuroscientist Saul Villeda of UCSF homed in on one actor he thought might be responsible for some of that effect:
who claim to have found conclusive evidence for the existence of so-called pentaquarks within the debris of high-energy proton collisions.
They measured the combined energy of two of the decay products proton and a meson known as J/Psi,
and antiquarknd then totted up how many times they recorded each energy value across the thousands of collisions they studied.
They found that the number of pairings with a certain energy little under five times the mass of the protonas far higher than would be expected by chance.
Energy and mass are equivalent, according to Einstein's equation E=mc2. The researchers concluded that that was the mass of a fleeting"charmonium"pentaquark containing two up quarks, one down quark, one charm quark,
the LHCB collaboration made use of data showing not only the energy of the particles produced in the CERN collisions but also their directions.
#Cool new material could make fuel cells cheaper It not enough for a new alternative energy technology to work.
That been a high hurdle for devices called solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCS) that convert fuelsuch as methane and hydrogenirectly to electricity without burning them.
a materials scientist and fuel cell expert at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who was involved not in the work. think it going to generate a lot of excitement. fuel cell works much like a battery.
Within it, two electrodes are separated by a charge-conducting electrolyte. In the case of SOFCS, the electrolyte consists of a solid ceramic membrane.
In the typical setup, air is fed to the negatively charged electrode, or cathode, where oxygen molecules pick up extra electrons.
generating water, carbon dioxide, and electricity. The electricity is fed through a circuit where it powers our devices,
and then is returned to the anode. As long fuel as is fed in, the SOFC continues pumping out electricity.
SOFCS have some promising capabilities. The devices make electricity at an efficiency that can match a large natural gas-based power plant.
But whereas a power plant is huge and costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build,
SOFCS can be made to be any size. That makes them attractive as backup power sources for hospitals and manufacturing plants
as well as for producing distributed power systems not connected to the grid. But SOFCS also have their drawbacks.
These devices work best at converting hydrogen gas and oxygen to water and electricity, and even work at lower temperatures around 600°C. Unlike conventional SOFCS the BZY membranes allow the flow not of negatively charged oxygen ions toward the anode,
and his colleagues have found a way to boost the power from BZY fuel cells. The researchers suspected one problem with the BZY membranes was in the way they were made.
the sweet spot temperature targeted by the fuel cell industry. Oayre and Haile caution that the new advance won revolutionize the SOFC industry overnight.
Commercial devices, by contrast, work by wiring many such devices together into what known as a fuel cell tackthat generates more power.
If future BZY-based SOFC stacks work as well as the individual devices, then it could finally produce the tipping point the fuel cell industry has been looking for n
The Pacific gas and electric company in San francisco and global energy giant Chevron are testing a handheld earthbound version that is 1000 times as sensitive as existing methane sniffers.
But existing methods for creating usable hydrogen gas from water require a lot of electricity. That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
To get around it they built a device that uses a single pulse of power to split water so continuous energy is needed not.
The device zaps water with electricity to release oxygen then a silicon-based chemical mediator dissolved in the water mops up stray protons and electrons.
The discovery hinged on the assumption that certain kinds of supernovae detonate in thermonuclear explosions that have fixed a amount of energy
if these sorts of energy-hungry civilisations exist WISE should have detected them Wright says. But identifying them is another story.
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
The result may help to control nuclear fusion reactors. These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
One problem with optimising their energy output is deducing what is going on inside them inserting a probe isn't an option as it would melt.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
and can be probed thanks to STEREO. The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside
which can cause plasma to escape the magnetic field containing it in the reactor. They may also be able to use turbulence to disrupt high energy plasma blobs that can rip holes in the reactor.
These results look very promising says Todd Evans of nuclear energy firm General Atomics in San diego California.
This article appeared in print under the headline Sunny surprise for fusion reactor r
#Canada uses satellite to scold Russia over Ukraine Canada has blocked the launch of a satellite aboard a Russian rocket as a result of tensions over Russia's actions in Ukraine.
The move is a step up from a largely symbolic US ban on cooperating with Russia in space earlier this month.
or align the electromagnetic fields of photons they came into contact with in the infant universe.
which creates an electromagnetic field that attracts the debris and pushes the net away from Earth's geomagnetic field.
And a US-based firm called Shackleton Energy company says it wants to send robots and teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
The particles annihilate on contact with ordinary matter vanishing in a puff of energy which makes it difficult to produce
and carried substances capable of supplying microbes with energy. We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably
and minerals that could act like batteries allowing electrons to flow and bring energy to any potential organisms.
They found all three. The instruments showed that between 20 and 30 per cent of the dust is called a clay mineral smectite
and so could have acted as microbial energy sources. All these clues point to ancient Mars hosting neutral slightly salty liquid water that could have supported primitive life.
but Miyake found a 1. 2 per cent leap in those years that could only have been caused by extremely high-energy cosmic rays hitting the Earth.
however as such a bright blast of energy would surely have been noted at the time and there is no historical record of such an energetic solar flare.
but this costs more and requires more energy to run. Color IQ is a thin glass tube,
all youe doing is replacing the light bulb, and yet the entire display looks much better.
Using the components in 20 million TVS is projected to save 600 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year worldwide enough electricity to power 50,000 average U s. homes. ee been able to show, cradle to grave,
When electrically charged, the dots illuminated a light bulb 25 times more efficiently than traditional devices.
In 2010, the company launched its first product, a QD light bulb, with partner Nexxus Lighting.
However, realizing this $100 light bulb would soon need to sell for $10 to remain competitive
QD light bulbs. he market has stabilized quite a bit, he says. omewhere down the line, we think there an application
MIT has a strong record of applying interdisciplinary approaches to large-scale problems from energy to cancer.
For example the MIT Energy Initiative has brought together faculty from across campus including the social sciences to conduct energy studies designed to inform future energy options and research.
These studies include technology policy reports focused on nuclear power coal natural gas and the smart electric grid.
#Wind energy reaches greater heights Wind turbines across the globe are being made taller to capture more energy from the stronger winds that blow at greater heights.
at wind farms, making taller towers more economically feasible. Keystone system is a modification of spiral welding,
A 460-foot tower, for instance, could increase energy capture by 10 to 50 percent, compared with today more common 260-foot towers. hat site-dependent,
because the trees slow down the wind near the ground you can see a 50 percent increase in energy capture for the same wind turbine.
Solving transport problems The Keystone system value lies in skirting wind turbine transportation constraints that have plagued the industry for years.
Towers are made in segments to be shipped to wind farms for assembly. But theye restricted to diameters of about 14 feet
Smith explains. ut there no way to weld together a tower in a factory that 20 feet in diameter and ship it to the wind farm.
Now, the company is working with the Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems, and other turbine makers, to plan out full-scale production,
t really opens up the whole country for turbines to capture large amounts of energy. l
#Beating battery drain Stream video on your smartphone or use its GPS for an hour or two and you ll probably see the battery drain significantly.
As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features battery life has become a concern.
Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone s battery last perhaps twice as long
and help to conserve energy in cell towers. The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones antennas.
Similar larger modules are found in wireless base stations where they might use 10 or even 100 times the power.
Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage eating away power more than any other smartphone component and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations#and wasting
This means smartphone batteries lose longevity and base stations waste energy and lose money. But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones)
and a shoebox-size module (for base stations) based on nearly a decade of MIT research to essentially switch gears to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed cutting the waste.
You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that every few nanoseconds modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery explains Joel Dawson Eta Devices chief technology officer
The savings could be substantial Dawson says noting that a large carrier could save $100 million in annual electricity costs.
Dawson says this could potentially double current smartphone battery life. Besides battery life Dawson adds there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency.
Eta Devices approach could lead to smaller handset batteries for example and even smaller handsets since there would be less dissipating heat.
The technology could also drive down operating costs for base stations in the developing world where these stations rely on expensive diesel fuel for power
At the time I was suffering as everyone else was from my iphone running out of battery at lunchtime Astrom says.
The research was supported by the U s. Department of energy the MIT Energy Initiative and the Chang family y
because scaling down emitters implies less power consumption less bias voltage to operate them and higher throughput says Velsquez-Garca a principal research scientist at MTL.
which produce energy that the cell can harness to control the flow of various molecules into and out of the cell.
The research was funded by the MIT Energy Initiative and the Department of energy y
#MIT launches Laboratory for Social Machines with major Twitter investment The MIT Media Lab today announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), funded by a five-year, $10 million
but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
The material works as part of a solar-thermophotovoltaic (STPV) device: The sunlight s energy is converted first to heat
which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun s spectrum.
Of course much work remains to realize a practical solar cell however the work here is one of the most important steps in that process.
In the robot s watertight chamber are its control circuitry its battery a communications antenna and an inertial measurement unit
The rechargeable lithium batteries used in the prototype Bhattacharyya says last about 40 minutes. Since the robot can travel between half a meter
Their next prototype Bhattacharyya says will feature wirelessly rechargeable batteries. And modifications to the propulsion system she says should increase the robot s operation time on a single charge to 100 minutes.
and require heavy battery packs a design that would significantly impede mobility and is given likely infeasible the limited power resources available to astronauts in space.
Now MIT researchers have developed an algorithm for bounding that they ve successfully implemented in a robotic cheetah a sleek four-legged assemblage of gears batteries
The group designed light bulbs called/0 Bulbs, that not only projected information, but also collected the information from a surface it projected onto.
especially for large models, Knezevic says. igh-fidelity simulation enables more cost-effective designs, better use of energy and materials,
#Recycling old batteries into solar cells This could be a classic win-win solution: A system proposed by researchers at MIT recycles materials from discarded car batteries a potential source of lead pollution into new,
long-lasting solar panels that provide emissions-free power. The system is described in a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental science,
co-authored by professors Angela M. Belcher and Paula T. Hammond, graduate student Po-Yen Chen,
It is based on a recent development in solar cells that makes use of a compound called perovskite specifically,
organolead halide perovskite a technology that has progressed rapidly from initial experiments to a point where its efficiency is nearly competitive with that of other types of solar cells. t went from initial demonstrations to good efficiency in less than two years,
says Belcher, the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT. Already, perovskite-based photovoltaic cells have achieved power-conversion efficiency of more than 19 percent,
which is close to that of many commercial silicon-based solar cells. Initial descriptions of the perovskite technology identified its use of lead,
whose production from raw ores can produce toxic residues, as a drawback. But by using recycled lead from old car batteries,
the team analysis shows that the lead from a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide power for 30 households.
As an added advantage, the production of perovskite solar cells is a relatively simple and benign process. t has the advantage of being a low-temperature process,
and the number of steps is reducedcompared with the manufacture of conventional solar cells, Belcher says.
Battery pileup ahead One motivation for using the lead in old car batteries is that battery technology is undergoing rapid change, with new, more efficient types, such as lithium-ion batteries,
swiftly taking over the market. nce the battery technology evolves, over 200 million lead-acid batteries will potentially be retired in the United states,
and that could cause a lot of environmental issues, Belcher says. Today, she says, 90 percent of the lead recovered from the recycling of old batteries is used to produce new batteries,
but over time the market for new lead-acid batteries is likely to decline, potentially leaving a large stockpile of lead with no obvious application.
In a finished solar panel, the lead-containing layer would be encapsulated fully by other materials, as many solar panels are today,
limiting the risk of lead contamination of the environment. When the panels are retired eventually, the lead can simply be recycled into new solar panels. he process to encapsulate them will be the same as for polymer cells today,
Chen says. hat technology can be translated easily. t is important that we consider the life cycles of the materials in large-scale energy systems,
Hammond says. nd here we believe the sheer simplicity of the approach bodes well for its commercial implementation.
Old lead is as good as new Belcher believes that the recycled perovskite solar cells will be embraced by other photovoltaics researchers,
who can now fine-tune the technology for maximum efficiency. The team work clearly demonstrates that lead recovered from old batteries is
just as good for the production of perovskite solar cells as freshly produced metal. Some companies are already gearing up for commercial production of perovskite photovoltaic panels,
which could otherwise require new sources of lead. Since this could expose miners and smelters to toxic fumes
which also included research scientist Jifa Qi, graduate student Matthew Klug and postdoc Xiangnan Dang, was supported by Italian energy company Eni through the MIT Energy Initiative y
and crawls away as soon as batteries are attached to it. The exciting thing here is that you create this device that has embedded computation in the flat printed version says Daniela Rus the Andrew
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