whose integrated chip restores lost power to partially shaded solar panels achieving double the energy capture improvement of similar technologies won big on Monday night at the seventh annual MIT Clean energy Prize (CEP) competition.
the DOE Energy efficiency and Renewable energy Clean energy Prize, worth $100, 000, and the NSTAR MIT Clean energy Prize, worth $125, 000.
or trees sacrifice as much as 30 percent of their energy potential over a year. Unified Solar technology, for the first time, integrates an entire power balance circuit onto a low-cost chip that can be integrated into a solar panel to regain that lost energy. n the real world,
shade happens, said Bessma Aljarbou, a graduate student at the MIT Sloan School of management, during Unified Solar winning pitch last night to a capacity crowd. hade brings energy loss, reliability concerns,
and a constrained market. And we have a solution. ompared to our competitors at the panel level,
we can recover twice as much energy under partial shading conditions, at a fraction of existing costs, added Arthur Chang,
Unified Solar now becomes the finalist in the energy category in the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition,
The CEP, the nation leading student-run energy business-plan competition, awarded a total of $320,
One finalist team was selected in each of three categories renewable energy (Thermovolt), energy efficiency (MF Fire), and infrastructure and resources (ulink) with each receiving $25, 000.
the improvement in energy capture under partial shading is basically two times better compared to panel level solutions,
The top prize for energy efficiency (and an Audience Choice Award) went to a University of Maryland team, MF Fire,
which turns solar cells into cogeneration systems. Sun exposure to solar panels produces about 0. 5 percent of wasted heat per Degree celsius increase.
Thermovolt modified solar cell captures that wasted energy and uses it to heat water for homes.
But a more cyclical approach where waste is used as an energy source could provide higher profit yields
yet organics in the wastewater have energy that can be extracted and used locally, Silver says. nd that the case for a lot of waste products in general.
The biogas enters a connected cogeneration system for power conversion. Depending on several site factors, this produces anywhere from 30 to 400 kilowatts of electricity.
where aerobic microorganisms degrade pollutants consume a lot of energy and generate biosolids (organic materials) that are managed at cost.
where the waste of industry is recycled to create energy and value much like in natural ecosystems. n a natural ecosystem,
or hydraulics and don t release more energy than they absorb they walk more slowly consume more metabolic energy
#Excitons observed in action for the first time A quasiparticle called an exciton responsible for the transfer of energy within devices such as solar cells LEDS
This could enable research leading to significant advances in electronics they say as well as a better understanding of natural energy transfer processes such as photosynthesis. The research is described this week in the journal Nature Communications in a paper co-authored by MIT postdocs Gleb
The particles determine how energy moves at the nanoscale. The efficiency of devices such as photovoltaics and LEDS depends on how well excitons move within the material he adds.
but it can carry energy. For example in a solar cell an incoming photon may strike an electron kicking it to a higher energy level.
but the boosted energy gets passed along from one to another. While it was previously possible to determine how fast on average excitons could move between two points we really didn t have any information about how they got there Akselrod says.
which combines optical microscopy with the use of particular organic compounds that make the energy of excitons visible we can directly say what kind of behavior the excitons were moving around with.
so that energy is lost not to leakage; for other uses such as solar cells it is essential to minimize the trapping.
We showed how energy flow is impeded by disorder which is the defining characteristic of most materials for low-cost solar cells
Plants absorb energy from photons and this energy is transferred by excitons to areas where it can be stored in chemical form for later use in supporting the plant s metabolism.
The new method might provide an additional tool for studying some aspects of this process the team says.
and store that energy in chemical form, ready to be released again on demand. This solution is no solar-energy panacea:
since it makes the sun energy, in the form of heat, storable and distributable, says Jeffrey Grossman, an associate professor of materials science and engineering,
Exposing them to sunlight causes them to absorb energy and jump from one configuration to the other,
taking in energy from the sun, storing it indefinitely, and then releasing it on demand.
In order to reach the desired energy density the amount of energy that can be stored in a given weight
The work was supported by BP though the MIT Energy Initiative and the U s. Department of energy Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy n
his could have great applications in energy, and especially in solar thermophotovoltaicsharnessing solar energy by using it to heat a material,
and the U s. Department of energy, through the MIT S3tec Energy Research Frontier Center r
#Seeking a parts list for the retina New technique classifies retinal neurons into 15 categories,
These hybrid materials could be worth exploring for use in energy applications such as batteries and solar cells Lu says.
Now, a team of MIT researchers wants to make plants even more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production
whose batteries are charged through energy generated by braking. According to tests conducted by the startup the $8000 system which has been incorporated into hundreds of vans in the commercial fleets of Coca-cola
which in turn releases the energy to the electric motor during acceleration. Custom software reads the driver s braking habits
Last month Fast Company ranked the startup No. 35 on its list of the world s 50 most innovative companies and third in energy-specific companies trailing only Tesla motors and General electric.
This week the company was named an Energy Innovation Pioneer by the global analytics company IHS at CERAWEEK a leading international energy conference.
but began viewing climate change and energy as the real challenges of my generation. After graduating he co-founded the consulting
and engineering services firm Strategic Energy systems with two MIT alumni before taking a position as director of alternative energy at Citizens Energy in Boston.
which had launched among other things the MIT Energy Club (2004) and the MIT Energy Initiative (2006) both
I got more engaged with MIT as MIT got more engaged with energy he says.
Back on campus he says the energy landscape has expanded certainly since he was an undergraduate
MIT has done a tremendous job at becoming a world center for energy innovation he says e
But Chandrakasan and his colleagues also developed a new signal-generating circuit that reduces the chip power consumption by an additional 20 to 30 percent.
But a new study by researchers at MIT finds that a egmentalapproach involving separate targeting of energy choices
and energy consumption through regulations or incentives can play an important role in achieving emission reductions. The new study, by assistant professor of engineering systems Jessika Trancik, is being published this week in the journal Environmental science and Technology.
but in future years, she says. ompliance with a carbon-focused policy can come either from changes in energy consumption levels or technological change,
and on energy efficiency work together? Doug Arent, a research scientist at the National Renewable energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
Since a conventional lidar system would require about 100 times as many photons to make depth estimates of similar accuracy under comparable conditions the new system could yield substantial savings in energy and time
and energy between the drop and the surface, Varanasi says. f you can get the drops to bounce faster,
The research received support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the MIT Energy Initiative, the National Science Foundation,
The research was supported by a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the MIT Energy Initiative,
To help figure that out the researchers created a form of cisplatin targeted to go to mitochondria cell organelles that generate energy.
GCS alone has provided more than $4 million in energy savings since it started selling solar lanterns three years ago.
Now MIT spinout Essess is bringing similar rive-byinnovations to energy efficiency in homes and businesses.
and foundations to help owners curb energy loss. About the size of a large backpack, Essessrig includes several long-wave infrared radiometric cameras and near-infrared cameras.
which households leak the most energy and, among those, which owners are most likely to make fixes,
But the startup also works with the U s. Department of defense to help identify energy-wasting buildings on their bases.
Revving up Essess Traditional energy audits usually involve sending one employee to a home to manually scan and record leaks.
Essess President and CEO Tom Scaramellino says. t not just figuring out who the worst culprits are who wasting the most energy
because there are customers that can be wasting energy, but theyl never fix it, he says. here the actual energy waste and the psychological component to do something about it.
Those are two distinct analyses we layer on top of one another. Results for utilities companies indicate for instance, which zip codes have homes with the most leaky attics and, among those,
which eat up about 50 percent of energy used in homes and buildings. HVAC system efficiency is affected by the system itself, by household behavioral factors such as thermostat and window usage and
and then there suddenly a catastrophic release of energy. he group continued to stretch and squeeze the ion crystal to manipulate the arrangement of atoms,
that can extract energy from the environment to recharge. Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology And circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it
even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous ultralow-power converters that used the same approach had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.
the chip power consumption remains low. e still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,
since the rate at which it dissipates energy as heat is proportional to the square of the current.
because there a fixed amount of energy that consumed by doing the work, says Brett Miwa,
while a flow battery system is appropriate for battery chemistries with a low energy density (those that can only store a limited amount of energy for a given weight),
for high-energy density devices such as lithium-ion batteries, the extra complexity and components of a flow system would add unnecessary extra cost.
#Tiny wires could provide a big energy boost Wearable electronic devices for health and fitness monitoring are a rapidly growing area of consumer electronics;
because other energy storage technologies such as fuel cells, batteries, and flywheels tend to be less efficient, or simply too complex to be reduced practical
it would be desirable to have a high volumetric power density (the amount of power stored in a given volume) and high volumetric energy density (the amount of energy in a given volume).
However, with the new device, e have fairly high volumetric power density, medium energy density, and a low cost, a combination that could be well suited for many applications.
cleaner fuels such as gasoline without using hydrogen a change that would reduce costs, energy use, and carbon dioxide emissions.
More than a third of the world energy needs are met using oil, and our reliance on that convenient, high-energy density resource will likely continue for decades to come, especially in the transportation sector.
But converting crude oil into lightweight, clean-burning, high-quality fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel is getting harder.
and desulfurize heavy crude oil are expensive and energy-intensive, and they require hydrogen, which companies typically produce from natural gas a high-cost process that consumes valuable gas resources
and how much energy is needed to start them. By knowing those nergy barriers, the researchers can determine the reaction rates under different operating conditions critical information for the overall model of the process.
and energy transfer between streams of fluids. But with supercritical fluids key parameters such as viscosity and density are in ranges not seen under normal (non-supercritical) conditions.
This research was supported by Saudi Aramco, a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative
#New study shows how nanoparticles can clean up environmental pollutants Many human-made pollutants in the environment resist degradation through natural processes,
citing its potential to reduce worldwide energy consumption. Now MIT spinout Cambridge Electronics Inc. CEI) has announced a line of Gan transistors and power electronic circuits that promise to cut energy usage in data centers, electric cars,
and consumer devices by 10 to 20 percent worldwide by 2025. Power electronics is a ubiquitous technology used to convert electricity to higher or lower voltages and different currents such as in a laptop power adapter
and off to regulate voltage but, due to speed and resistance constraints, waste energy as heat. CEI Gan transistors have at least one-tenth the resistance of such silicon-based transistors, according to the company.
CEI is using its transistors to enable power electronics that will make data centers less energy-intensive
and to really make an impact on how energy is used in the world, says CEI cofounder Tomás Palacios,
but the energy conversion process involves multiple steps #and it's difficult to isolate the efficiency of each step says Dr. Brendan O'connor an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the work.
Solar energy will have the greatest impact on the European energy system if focus is on transport of solar power from North africa and Southern Europe to Northern europe."
"Reducing energy losses during electric power transmission is one of the most important factors for the energy systems of the future,
and that a minimum of energy is lost during the transfer. To do that in conventional semiconductor junctions the crystalline structures of both materials need to match.
and Barry Rand an assistant professor of electrical engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
Heterostructured nanoparticles can be used as catalysts and in advanced energy conversion and storage systems. Typically these nanoparticles are created from tiny seeds of one material on top of
Findings are detailed in a paper published in November in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
#Toward a low-cost'artificial leaf'that produces clean hydrogen fuel For years scientists have been pursuing artificial leaf technology a green approach to making hydrogen fuel that copies plants'ability to convert sunlight into a form of energy they can use.
Producing hydrogen at low cost from water using the clean energy from the sun would make this form of energy
thus saving energy. Furthermore, as opposed to other methods no expensive devices are required. The film with the nanochannels is placed merely in the precipitation bath."
However it will provide an environmentally friendly low-cost way to make nanoporous graphene for use in supercapacitors-devices that can store energy and release it rapidly.
The findings were published just in Nano Energy by scientists from the OSU College of Science OSU College of Engineering Argonne National Laboratory the University of South Florida and the National Energy technology Laboratory in Albany Ore.
A supercapacitor is a type of energy storage device but it can be recharged much faster than a battery
and short but powerful energy release is needed. They are being used in consumer electronics and have applications in heavy industry with the ability to power anything from a crane to a forklift.
A supercapacitor can capture energy that might otherwise be wasted such as in braking operations. And their energy storage abilities may help smooth out the power flow from alternative energy systems such as wind energy.
Process turns cellulose into energy storage device e
#Nanotubes may restore sight to blind retinas The aging process affects everything from cardiovascular function to memory to sexuality.
which require wiring to outside energy or light sources this is a groundbreaking new direction. The research team received funding for their study from the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology the European Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council.
which display processor memory and energy devices are integrated. The high temperature processes essential for high performance electronic devices have restricted severely the development of flexible electronics because of the fundamental thermal instabilities of polymer materials.
and inorganic-based energy devices such as battery solar cell and self-powered devices that require high temperature processes s
but this costs more and requires more energy to run. Color IQ is a thin glass tube,
#Streamlining thin film processing saves time energy Energy storage devices and computer screens may seem worlds apart but they're not.
and commercialize renewable bio-based energy technologies. The proof-of-concept grants allow researchers to advance promising research to the next level of toward product development and commercialization.
This saves energy and is much more efficient Fan said. In this project he has been collaborating with assistant professor Zhengrong Gu in the agricultural
The high-energy plasma can deposit highly transparent and conductive thin films create high quality semiconductors and pattern micro-or nanoscale devices thus making the display images brighter and clearer.
The activation method has the potential to improve production efficiency saving time and energy he noted d
and energy materials said co-author Volker Rose. Both that remarkable resolution and the precise chemical fingerprinting of individual nickel nanoclusters were also clearly evident in the topographic images of the sample surface even down to the height of a single atom.
Today it signals a promising discovery in materials science research that could help next-generation technology-like wearable energy storage devices-get off the ground.
-and hold enough energy to run your watch for a long period of time said Michel Barsoum Phd Distinguished Professor in the College of Engineering.
and can store energy but it would also need to be flexible enough to bend around your wrist.
Crumpled graphene could provide an unconventional energy storag g
#Microtubes create cozy space for neurons to grow and grow fast Tiny, thin microtubes could provide a scaffold for neuron cultures to grow
who is also a member of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute (Kavli ENSI). Nanopore sequencing of DNA, in
The secret of such an imaginary non-stop vibrating system relies on the fact that it dissipates very little energy.
The energy dissipation of a vibrating system is quantified by the quality factor. In laboratories, by knowing the quality factor,
and how much energy is lost in the process. This allows them to determine how precise the resonator can be at measuring
In this case the energy requirement does not allow the structure to break its symmetry. In a study led by Xiang Zhang director of Berkeley Lab's Materials sciences Division he
Chemists gain edge in next-gen energy Rice university scientists who want to gain an edge in energy production and storage report they have found it in molybdenum disulfide.
and have potential for a variety of energy-oriented applications. The Rice research appears in the journal Advanced Materials.
which store energy quickly as static charge and release it in a burst. Though they don't store as much energy as an electrochemical battery they have long lifespans
and are in wide use because they can deliver far more power than a battery. The Rice lab built supercapacitors with the films;
and aluminum (NCA) offers high enough energy density a measure of the stored electricity in the battery that it works well in large-scale and long-range vehicles including electric cars and commercial aircraft.
But that temperature threshold dropped for a highly charged battery suggesting that operating at full energy capacity accelerates structural degradation and vulnerability.
To capture the atoms'electronic structures the scientists used electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS. In this technique measurements of the energy lost by a well-defined electron beam reveal local charge densities and elemental configurations.
We found a decrease in nickel and an increase in the electron density of oxygen Hwang said.
In this process a material absorbs x-ray photons at a specific rate as a function of photon energy.
A plot of the absorption intensity as a function of energy is referred to as a spectrum
The x-ray photons used in this study have energies that are about 250 times higher than those of visible light
These experiments result in absorption vs. x-ray energy curves (spectra) that reflect how water molecules within nanometers of the gold surface absorb the x-rays.
's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) he conducted large molecular dynamics simulations of the gold-water interface
-when compared to other energy sources.""The first tests conducted with Biogàsplus demonstrated that product increases up to 200%the production of this combustible gas.
The global market for graphene is reported to have reached US$9 million this year with most sales concentrated in the semiconductor electronics battery energy and composites.
This progress has important applications in sectors such as chemical, petrochemical and energy, thus becoming a useful technology in all industrial applications using heat transfer systems such as solar power plants, nuclear power plants, combined-cycle power plants and heating, among other.
These fluids are employed to transport energy in the form of heat from the point where the heat is generated (burners
He and his colleagues also are working on energy technologies such as solar cells and batteries that can improve efficiency
and renewable energy storage, high-density energy storage systems are needed. Lithium-ion batteries, though mature and widely utilized, have encountered the theoretical limit
Lithium-sulfur batteries, owning a theoretical energy density of 2600 Wh kg-1, which are approximately 4 times as much as commercially used lithium-ion batteries,
which will be highly useful as electrodes and membranes for energy generation or storage. While we have demonstrated only the construction of graphene-based structures in this study we strongly believe that the new technique will be able to serve as a general method for the assembly of a much wider range of nanomaterials concluded Franklin Kim the principal investigator of the study y
Brighter new energy saving flat panel lights based on carbon nanotubes Even as the 2014 Nobel prize in Physics has enshrined light emitting diodes (LEDS) as the single most significant and disruptive energy-efficient lighting solution of today scientists
Thus the new flat-panel device has compared smaller energy loss with other current lighting devices which can be used to make energy-efficient cathodes that with low power consumption.
This capability should open up entirely new strategies for fields ranging from computer miniaturization to energy and pathogen detection n
whether it is for energy capture, or to create artificial noses for the early detection of disease
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.
In the near future carbon nanotube fibers have potential to significantly enhance the performance and energy efficiency of electrical machines.
diffusive theory over-predicted the amount of energy carried away from the heated surface.""We discovered fundamental differences in how heat is transported over short versus long distances.
or discontinuous pathways that pose a serious drawback when using blended systems known as bulk heterojunction donor-acceptor or positive-negative (p-n) junctions for harvesting energy in organic solar cells.
and like grass blades they are particularly effective at converting light to energy. The advance not only addresses the problem of dead ends or discontinuous pathways that make for inefficient energy transfer
but it also solves some instability problems where the materials in mixed blends of polymers tend to lose their phase-separated behavior over time degrading energy transfer the polymer chemist says.
Also materials in blended systems tend to be amorphous to semi-crystalline at best and this is a disadvantage
and the ability to efficiently convert light into energy. The technique is simple inexpensive and applicable to a library of donor
We envision that our nanopillar solar cells will appeal to low-end energy applications such as gadgets toys sensors and short lifetime disposable devices s
This means that the transport of electric charges occurs with a very little energy loss. Previous studies have reported that there is a percolation threshold for the amount of carbon nanotubes necessary to transport efficiently electric charges in a device.
Toward making lithium-sulfur batteries a commercial reality for a bigger energy punch More information:
but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
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.
which can consume a great deal of energy particularly in computing applications. Researchers are therefore searching for ways to harness other properties of electrons such as the'spin'of an electron as data carriers in the hope that this will lead to devices that consume less power.
When semiconducting materials are subjected to an input of a specific energy bound electrons can be moved to higher energy conducting states.
The specific energy required to make this jump to the conducting state is defined as the band gap.
#Controlling photoluminescence with silicon nanophotonics for better devices Silicon nanowires have a great deal of potential in future high-performance electronic sensing and energy devices.
Resonant energy transfer from quantum dots to graphene More information: Edes Saputra Jun Ohta Naoki Kakuda and Koichi Yamaguchi Self-Formation of In-Plane Ultrahigh-Density Inas Quantum dots on Gaassb/Gaas (001) Appl.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011