and Energy Devices Laboratory there. ndrew has managed to make our dream of structural energy storage materials into a realitysays Pint.
That is important because structural energy storage will change the way in which a wide variety of technologies are developed in the future. hen you can integrate energy into the components used to build systems it opens the door to a whole new world of technological possibilities.
Furthermore the mechanical robustness of the device doesn t compromise its energy storage capability. n an unpackaged structurally integrated state our supercapacitor can store more energy
when considering multifunctional energy storage systems. attery performance metrics change when you re putting energy storage into heavy materials that are needed already for structural integritysays Pint. upercapacitors store ten times less energy than current lithium-ion batteries
and then coated with a protective ultrathin graphene-like layer of carbon. Sandwiched between the two electrodes is a polymer film that acts as a reservoir of charged ions similar to the role of the electrolyte paste in a battery.
The US Department of energy s Advanced Research Project Agency for Energy is investing $8. 7 million in research projects that focus specifically on incorporating energy storage into structural materials.
However Pint points out that there have not been any reports in the technical literature of tests performed on structural energy storage materials that show how they function under realistic mechanical loads.
and mined by data centers. growing number of applications are designed to tolerate oisyreal-world inputs and use statistical or probabilistic types of computations. he nature of these computations is different from the traditional computations where you need a precise answersays Srimat Chakradhar department head for Computing systems Architecture at NEC Laboratories America
and biofuels industries using technology that is already well-established for cellulose-based materials. ome of the byproducts of the paper industry now go to making biofuels
#Car paint with graphene gets ice off radar domes Rice university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mike Williams-Rice on December 18 2013ribbons of ultrathin graphene combined with polyurethane paint meant for cars can keep ice off of sensitive military
because they re very poor conductors. nter graphene the single-atom-thick sheet of carbon that both conducts electricity and because it s so thin allows radio frequencies to pass unhindered.
Spray-on deicing material that incorporates graphene nanoribbons would be lighter cheaper and more effective than current methods Tour says.
when (Lockheed martin engineer) Vladimir Volman saw a presentation by Yu Zhu a postdoc in my lab at the timehe says. olman had calculated that one could pass a current through a graphene film less than 100 nanometers thick
and Volman recognized the potential. ristine graphene transmits electricity ballistically and would not produce enough heat to melt ice
but graphene nanoribbons (GNRS) unzipped from multiwalled carbon nanotubes in a chemical process invented by the Tour group in 2009 do the job nicely he says.
#3d printed loudspeaker plays Obama speech The first 3d printed consumer electronic is a loudspeaker that comes out of the printer ready to use.
It s an achievement that 3d printing evangelists feel will soon be the norm; rather than assembling consumer products from parts and components complete functioning products could be fabricated at once on demand. verything is 3d printedsays Apoorva Kiran as he launched a demo by connecting the newly printed mini speaker to amplifier wires.
For the demo the amplifier played a clip from President Barack Obama s State of the Union speech that mentioned 3d printing.
Lipson says he hopes this simple demonstration is just the ip of the iceberg. 3d printing technology could be moving from printing passive parts toward printing active integrated systems he adds.
#From coal, cheap quantum dots in one step Chemists have discovered how to reduce three kinds of coal into graphene quantum dots (GQDS) that could be used for medical imaging as well as sensing electronic and photovoltaic applications.
In quantum dots microscopic discs of atom-thick graphene oxide band gaps are responsible for their fluorescence and can be tuned by changing the dots'##size.
That involved crushing the coal and bathing it in acid solutions to break the bonds that hold the tiny graphene domains together. ou can'##t just take a piece of graphene
when the so-called Fermi energy is much larger than the thermal energy. When pumped by a strong laser these quantum degenerate particles gathered energy
#Faster 3d printing with multiple materials University of Southern California Posted by Megan Hazle-USC on November 21 2013researchers have developed a faster 3d printing process
3d printing Multi-Material Objects Faster from USC Viterbi on Vimeo. With this newly developed 3d printing process
however the team has shaved the fabrication time down to minutes bringing the manufacturing world one step closer to achieving its goal. igital material design
but over the past several decades various additive manufacturing (AM) processes have been developed to fabricate both homogeneous and heterogeneous objects more quickly.
This new 3d printing process will allow heterogeneous prototypes and objects such as dental and robotics models to be fabricated more cost-and time-efficiently than ever before.
engineers turned to atomically thin graphene. James Hone a mechanical engineering professor at Columbia University who co-led the project says the work emonstrates an application of graphene that cannot be achieved using conventional materials.
And it s an important first step in advancing wireless signal processing and designing ultrathin efficient cell phones. ur devices are much smaller than any other sources of radio signals
and can be put on the same chip that s used for data processing. raphene a single atomic layer of carbon is the world s strongest material
The combination of these properties makes graphene an ideal material for nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) which are scaled-down versions of the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) used widely for sensing of vibration and acceleration.
In this new study published in Nature Nanotechnology the team took advantage of graphene s mechanical tretchabilityto tune the output frequency of their custom oscillator creating a nanomechanical version of an electronic component known as a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO.
The team built a graphene NEMS whose frequency was about 100 megahertz which lies right in the middle of the FM radio band (87.7 to 108 MHZ).
They used low-frequency musical signals (both pure tones and songs from an iphone) to modulate the 100 MHZ carrier signal from the graphene
While graphene NEMS will not be used to replace conventional radio transmitters they have many applications in wireless signal processing. ue to the continuous shrinking of electrical circuits known as Moore s Law today s cell phones have more computing
and their frequency can be tuned over a wide range because of graphene s tremendous mechanical strength. here is a long way to go toward actual applications in this areanotes Hone ut this work is an important first step.
and Shepard groups are now working on improving the performance of the graphene oscillators to have lower noise.
At the same time they are also trying to demonstrate integration of graphene NEMS with silicon integrated circuits making the oscillator design even more compact.
The electrodes worked for about 100 charge-discharge cycles without significantly losing their energy storage capacity. hat s still quite a way from the goal of about 500 cycles for cell phones
and close to the desired value for efficient solar energy conversion. o that's a viable material to begin with and the bandgap also proceeds to vary through the visible range as we add more
which convert light energy into electrical current. But this versatile energy harvester could be tuned to harvest the signal from other energy sources including satellite signals sound signals
and low-cost energy storage materials and lithium sulfur batteries are one of the most promising candidatessays Weidong Zhou a former postdoctoral researcher in Professor Hector Abruã a s lab at Cornell
and stabilize the sulfur the researchers used amylopectin a polysaccharide that s a main component of corn starch. he corn starch can effectively wrap the graphene oxide-sulfide composite through the hydrogen bonding to confine the polysulfide among the carbon layerssays Hao Chen
TWIPS exploits the natural abilities of dolphins to process their sonar signals to distinguish between targets
and electric vehicles and to provide the bursts of power required to adjust of the blades of giant wind turbines to changing wind conditions.
what would happensays Pint. ypically researchers grow graphene from silicon-carbide materials at temperatures in excess of 1400 degrees Celsius.
But at lower temperatures 600 to 700 degrees Celsius we certainly didn t expect graphene-like material growth. hen the researchers pulled the porous silicon out of the furnace they found that it had turned from orange to purple or black.
but it was coated by a layer of graphene a few nanometers thick. They tested the coated material
And when they used it to make supercapacitors they found that the graphene coating improved energy densities by over two orders of magnitude compared to those made from uncoated porous silicon and significantly better than commercial supercapacitors.
The graphene layer acts as an atomically thin protective coating. Pint and his group argue that this approach isn t limited to graphene. he ability to engineer surfaces with atomically thin layers of materials combined with the control achieved in designing porous materials opens opportunities for a number of different applications beyond energy storagehe
says. espite the excellent device performance we achieved our goal wasn t to create devices with record performancesays Pint. t was to develop a road map for integrated energy storage.
Silicon is an ideal material to focus on because it is the basis of so much of our modern technology and applications.
since it is very expensive and wasteful to produce thin silicon wafers. int s group is currently using this approach to develop energy storage that can be formed in the excess materials or on the unused backsides of solar cells and sensors.
because they throw away the majority of the sun s energy. hermophotovoltaic devices are designed to overcome that limitation.
and electrochemical energy storage. raun and Fan plan to test other ceramic-type materials and determine if the experimental thermal emitters can deliver infrared light to a working solar cell. e ve demonstrated that the tailoring of optical properties at high temperatures is possiblebraun says. afnium
By adding modified single-atom-thick graphene nanoribbons (GNRS) to thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) the team at Rice made it 1000 times harder for gas molecules to escape Tour says.
The researchers acknowledge that a solid two-dimensional sheet of graphene might be the perfect barrier to gas
but the production of graphene in such bulk quantities is not yet practical Tour says. But graphene nanoribbons are already there.
Tour s breakthrough nzippingtechnique for turning multiwalled carbon nanotubes into GNRS first revealed in Nature in 2009 has been licensed for industrial production. hese are being produced in bulk
But the overlapping 200-to 300-nanometer-wide ribbons dispersed so well that they were nearly as effective as large-sheet graphene in containing gas molecules.
The GNRS geometry makes them far better than graphene sheets for processing into composites Tour says.
The Air force Research Laboratory through the University Technology Corp. the Office of Naval Research MURI graphene program and the Air force Office of Scientific research MURI program supported the research.
#At super high temps, white graphene stops rust Atomically thin sheets of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) have the handy benefit of protecting
They also grew h-BN on graphene and found they could transfer sheets of h-BN to copper
Researchers say the discovery could one day lead to bigger harvests of biomass for renewable energy.
Scientists at Cornell and Germany s University of Ulm had been making graphene a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms in a chicken wire crystal formation on copper foils in a quartz furnace.
They noticed some uckon the graphene and upon further inspection found it to be composed of the elements of everyday glass silicon and oxygen.
This produced the glass layer on the would-be pure graphene. The work that describes direct imaging of this thin glass was published first in January 2012 in Nano Letters
information is stored in artificial structures called quantum bits and you can even see them with your bare eyes.
the researchers sandwiched it between layers of reduced graphene oxide and two current collectors to form a supercapacitor.
of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University. Using mouse studies only about 100 genes with imprinted expression had been identified.
The Cornell Center for Vertebrate Genomics Zweig Memorial Fund and Morris Animal Foundation funded the research h
#Compact graphene device could shrink supercapacitors Monash University rightoriginal Studyposted by Emily Walker-Monash on August 5 2013monash U. AUS)# A new strategy to engineer graphene-based supercapacitors could make them viable
for widespread use in renewable energy storage portable electronics and electric vehicles. Supercapacitors are made generally of highly porous carbon impregnated with a liquid electrolyte to transport the electrical charge.
Graphene which is formed when graphite is broken down into layers one atom thick is very strong chemically stable and an excellent conductor of electricity.
To make their uniquely compact electrode Li s team exploited an adaptive graphene gel film they had developed previously.
They used liquid electrolytes#generally the conductor in traditional supercapacitors#to control the spacing between graphene sheets on the subnanometer scale.
maintaining the minute space between the graphene sheets and conducting electricity. Unlike in traditional#hard#porous carbon where space is wasted with unnecessarily large pores density is maximized without compromising porosity in Li s electrode.
#We have created a macroscopic graphene material that is a step beyond what has been achieved previously. It is almost at the stage of moving from the lab to commercial development#Li says.
for Integrative Genomics. Lang is first author on the paper which appears in the journal Nature.
Adrien Treuille, associate professor of computer science and robotics, says the drawing assistance app is just one example of how Big data can be used to enhance drawing
each with stroke-by-stroke information about how it was created. e are in the middle of a Big data revolution,
Treuille says. ee found that Big data can be used to do amazing things. But success is not inevitable;
With Drawafriend, wee found a way to use crowdsourcing to create this critical resource for a data-impoverished phenomenon.
Halas and colleagues showed that olar steamwas so effective at direct conversion of solar energy into heat that it could even produce steam from ice water. t makes steam directly from sunlight,
#Graphene#s jagged edge can easily slice cells Brown University right Original Study Posted by Kevin Stacey-Brown on July 10 2013brown (US) the jagged edges of tiny graphene sheets
After the membrane is pierced an entire graphene sheet can be pulled inside the cell where it may disrupt normal function.
The new insight may be helpful in finding ways to minimize the potential toxicity of graphene says Agnes Kane chair of the pathology and laboratory medicine department at Brown and one of the study s authors.
Discovered about a decade ago graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick.
Their work on graphene started with some seemingly contradictory findings. Oddly shaped flakes Preliminary research by Kane s biology group had shown that graphene sheets can indeed enter cells
but it wasn clear how they got there. Huajian Gao professor of engineering tried to explain those results using powerful computer simulations
His models which simulate interactions between graphene and cell membranes at the molecular level suggested that it would be quite rare for a microsheet to pierce a cell.
The problem turned out to be that those initial simulations assumed a perfectly square piece of graphene.
In reality graphene sheets are rarely so pristine. When graphene is exfoliated or peeled away from thicker chunks of graphite the sheets come off in oddly shaped flakes with jagged protrusions called asperities.
When Gao reran his simulations with asperities included the sheets were able to pierce the membrane much more easily.
She placed human lung skin and immune cells in Petri dishes along with graphene microsheets. Electron microscope images confirmed that graphene entered the cells starting at rough edges and corners.
The experiments showed that even fairly large graphene sheets of up to 10 micrometers could be internalized completely by a cell.
The engineers and the material scientists can analyze and describe these materials in great detail Kane says.
what happens once a graphene sheet gets inside the cell. But Kane says this initial study provides an important start in understanding the potential for graphene toxicity.
This is about the safe design of nanomaterials she says. Theye man-made materials so we should be able to be clever
#Graphene ribbons improve lithium ion batteries Anodes for lithium ion batteries built with ribbons of graphene perform better, tests show.
Rice university chemist James Tour and colleagues, who developed a method for unzipping nanotubes into graphene nanoribbons (GNRS),
figured out how to make graphene nanoribbons in bulk and are moving toward commercial applications. One area ripe for improvement is the humble battery.
In the new experiments, the Rice lab mixed graphene nanoribbons and tin oxide particles about 10 nanometers wide in a slurry with a cellulose gum binder and a bit of water, spread it on a current collector
##Quilted graphene is also super strong COLUMBIA U. US) Graphene, even if stitched together from many small crystalline grains,
Graphene consists of a single atomic layer of carbon, arranged in a honeycomb lattice. ur first Science paper,
in 2008, studied the strength graphene can achieve if it has no defectsts intrinsic strength,
pristine graphene exists only in very small areas. Large-area sheets required for applications must contain many small grains connected at grain boundaries,
reports on the strength of large-area graphene films grown using chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and wee excited to say that graphene is back and stronger than ever.
The study verifies that commonly used methods for postprocessing CVD-grown graphene weaken grain boundaries
resulting in the extremely low strength seen in previous studies. The team developed a new process that prevents any damage of graphene during transfer. e substituted a different etchant
and were able to create test samples without harming the graphene, notes the paper lead author, Gwan-Hyoung Lee,
a postdoctoral fellow in the Hone lab. ur findings clearly correct the mistaken consensus that grain boundaries of graphene are weak.
This is great news because graphene offers such a plethora of opportunities both for fundamental scientific research and industrial applications.
In its perfect crystalline form, graphene (a one-atom-thick carbon layer) is the strongest material ever measured
as the team reported in 2008o strong that, as Hone observes, t would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil,
to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran wrap. For the first study, the team obtained small, structurally perfect flakes of graphene by mechanical exfoliation,
or mechanical peeling, from a crystal of graphite. But exfoliation is a time-consuming process that will never be practical for any of the many potential applications of graphene that require industrial mass production. httpv://www. youtube. com/watch?
v=VSPWRC6RCVY Why so weak? Currently, scientists can grow sheets of graphene as large as a television screen by using chemical vapor deposition (CVD), in
which single layers of graphene are grown on copper substrates in a high-temperature furnace. One of the first applications of graphene may be as a conducting layer in flexible displays. ut CVD graphene is titchedtogether from many small crystalline grainsike a quiltt grain boundaries that contain defects in the atomic structure,
Kysar explains. hese grain boundaries can severely limit the strength of large-area graphene if they break much more easily than the perfect crystal lattice,
and so there has been intense interest in understanding how strong they can be. The team wanted to discover what was making CVD graphene so weak.
In studying the processing techniques used to create their samples for testing, they found that the chemical most commonly used to remove the copper substrate also causes damage to the graphene,
severely degrading its strength. Their experiments demonstrated that CVD graphene with large grains is exactly as strong as exfoliated graphene,
showing that its crystal lattice is just as perfect. And, more surprisingly, their experiments also showed that CVD graphene with small grains
even when tested right at a grain boundary, is about 90 percent as strong as the ideal crystal. his is an exciting result for the future of graphene,
because it provides experimental evidence that the exceptional strength it possesses at the atomic scale can persist all the way up to samples inches
or more in size, says Hone. his strength will be invaluable as scientists continue to develop new flexible electronics and ultrastrong composite materials.
Strong, large-area graphene can be used for a wide variety of applications such as flexible electronics and strengthening componentsotentially,
a science fiction idea of a space elevator that could connect an orbiting satellite to Earth by a long cord that might consist of sheets of CVD graphene,
since graphene (and its cousin material, carbon nanotubes) is the only material with the high strength-to-weight ratio required for this kind of hypothetical application.
The team is excited also about studying 2d materials like graphene. ery little is known about the effects of grain boundaries in 2d materials
This is due to all the atoms in graphene being surface atoms, so surface damage that would normally not degrade the strength of 3d materials can completely destroy the strength of 2d materials. owever with appropriate processing that avoids surface damage,
especially graphene, can be nearly as strong as the perfect, defect-free structure. The Air force Office of Scientific research and the National Science Foundation supported the research c
FLORIDA (US)# Tiny unmanned vehicles may one day be able to swarm over under and through hurricanes to help predict the strength and path of storms.
and could one day be used in many places from consumer goods to quantum computers. The findings are published in Nature.
and requires constant cooling by liquid helium to prevent the excitons inside the gallium arsenide semiconductors from being pulled apart by thermal energy.
#Stanford researchers are already using the polariton laser to develop quantum computers and quantum simulators. Kim believes similar lasers will be available to those outside the scientific community within the next five to 10 years.
#Clean power is on its way for data centers as a service too Using clean energy to power data centers is becoming increasingly commonplace,
which provide data center space as a service, are beginning to offer clean energy options, too. On Thursday Phoenix, Arizona-based data center service provider IO announced that customers purchasing data center space in the company Arizona facility can buy 100 percent clean energy, at an incremental cost increase
through a new deal with Arizona utility Arizona Public service. IO President Anthony Wanger said that the new offering came
as a result of clear call by our customers to use cost-effective clean energy to power their data centers.
APS has contracted to buy all of the 280 MW of solar energy from the Solana solar thermal plant 70 miles southwest of Phoenix. That could provide enough solar electricity for 70
starting with using wind to power a data center in Indiana. Wind is the cheapest clean energy option
one with the name IO that will continue to sell data center services, and the other called Baselayer that will sell data center container solutions.
The move is meant to provide more runway as the company works toward an exit, after it filed a planned IPO
#Autodesk is now selling an open-source 3d printer Autodesk first foray into hardware is here: The Ember 3d printer is now available for anyone to order.
At $5, 995, the printer isn exactly a steal. Autodesk more so built it to be the perfect exhibitor for its open-source Spark 3d printing software,
which is currently in beta. People married to Autodesk suite of software might find that pairing of interest,
but the greater 3d printing industry might buy Ember because Autodesk plans to release exactly how it is built
Makerbot, the best known desktop 3d printer brand, gave rise to an entire class of printers
because it requires the machine to use a lot less force, according to Autodesk 3d printing research scientist Andreas Bastian.
Each time the projector cures a layer, it creates a huge amount of suction between the 3d printed object and the bottom of the resin tank.
He said that has added the benefit of exerting less force on the 3d printed object, making it easier to print delicate structures that can take a lot of strain.
#Self-healing materials could lead to safer nuclear reactors One of the key challenges when designing nuclear reactors is finding materials that can withstand the massive temperatures, radiation, physical stress and corrosive conditions of these extreme environments.
Exposure to high radiation alone produces significant damage at the nanoscale, so scientists at Los alamos National Laboratory, New mexico, have been working on a mechanism that allows nanocrystalline materials to heal themselves after suffering radiation-induced damage.
There no doubt that in the race for green power the human body has been overlooked in favor of alternative fuel sources such as biofuels, hydrogen etc.
the system also requires a consumer-grade digital camera, a few 3d printed parts, such as rollers that can take different sized film,
In the same way that the animals steer themselves by moving the funnel that the water comes out of the Fraunhofer system can also be steered using a motor to selectively point the balls in the desired direction (s). The whole apparatus can be fabricated in one step using a 3d printer.
In Colombia big data has been helping farmers with targeted information on whether or not to plant crops, and when.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011