000 LED bulbs by stomping one foot One day it may be possible to harvest the otherwise wasted energy of your footsteps
Beyond generating power the technology could also provide a new type of self-powered sensor allowing detection of vibrations motion water leaks explosions
and sensor applicationssays Zhong Lin Wang a professor in the School of Materials science and engineering. his opens up a source of energy by harvesting power from activities of all kinds. n its simplest form the triboelectric generator
If an electrical load is connected then to two electrodes placed at the outer edges of the two surfaces a small current will flow to equalize the charges.
Such sensors could be used for monitoring in traffic security environmental science health care and infrastructure applications. or the future Wang and his research team plan to continue studying the nanogenerators
and sensors to improve their output and sensitivity. The size of the material can be scaled up
and there is much more we can do with this. he US Department of energy National Science Foundation National Institute for Materials science in Japan Samsung
and freezing rain from forming directly on antennas. But the domes themselves must also be kept clear of ice that could damage them
The 100-nanometer layer of GNRSÂ##thousands of times thinner than a human hairâ##was hooked to platinum electrodes.
#3d-printed loudspeaker plays Obama speech The first 3d-printed consumer electronic is a loudspeaker that comes out of the printer ready to use.
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.
while before consumers are printing electronics at home Lipson says. Most printers cannot efficiently handle multiple materials.
It s not the first time a consumer electronic device was printed in Lipson s lab. Back in 2009 Malone
and former lab member Matthew Alonso printed a working replica of the Vail Register the famous antique telegraph receiver
hat hath God wrought. reating a market for printed electronic devices Lipson says could be like introducing color printers after only black and white had existed. t opens up a whole new space that makes the old look primitive. ource:
#New transistors offer high output at low voltage A new type of transistor could pave the way for fast computing devices that would use very low energy including smart sensor networks and implanted medical devices.
Called a near broken-gap tunnel field effect transistor (TFET) the new device uses the quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons through an ultrathin energy barrier to provide high current at low voltage.
Tunnel field effect transistors are considered to be a potential replacement for current CMOS transistors as device makers search for a way to continue shrinking the size of transistors and packing more transistors into a given area.
The main challenge facing current chip technology is that as size decreases the power required to operate transistors does not decrease in step.
The results can be seen in batteries that drain faster and increasing heat dissipation that can damage delicate electronic circuits.
Various new types of transistor architecture using materials other than the standard silicon are being studied to overcome the power consumption challenge. his transistor has previously been developed in our lab to replace MOSFET transistors for logic applications
The researchers led by Suman Datta professor of electrical engineering tuned the material composition of the indium gallium arsenide/gallium arsenide antimony
To improve amplification the researchers moved all the contacts to the same plane at the top surface of the vertical transistor.
The finding offers a potential new technology for advanced sensors high-resolution displays and information processing.
and optical switches small enough to be integrated into computer chips for information processing sensing and telecommunications says Alexander Kildishev associate research professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.
and processing of data inside chips for information technologykildishev says. he smallest featuresâ##the strokes of the lettersâ##displayed in our experiment are only 1 micron wide.
because the wavelength of light is too large to fit in tiny components needed for integrated circuits. Nanostructured metamaterials however are making it possible to reduce the wavelength of light allowing the creation of new types of nanophotonic devices says Vladimir M. Shalaev scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue s Birck Nanotechnology Center
and this is unprecedentedshalaev says. his means you can start to embed it in electronics to marry it with electronics. he layer is about 1/23rd the width of the wavelength of light used to create the holograms.
Each antenna has its own hase delayow much light is slowed as it passes through the structure.
and can be achieved by altering the V-shaped antennas. The US Air force Office of Scientific research Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation partially funded the research.
much as the ability to grow silicon in perfect crystalline arrangements made possible the multibillion-dollar semiconductor industry. irkin s
but the recipe can be applied to a variety of materials with potential applications in the fields of materials science photonics electronics
for each the DNA length that led to crystal formation was about 18 base pairs and six single-base ticky ends.?
The team previously reported the first observation of superfluorescence in a solid-state system by strongly exciting semiconductor quantum wells in high magnetic fields.
However electrons and holes in semiconductors are charged particles so they interact more strongly than atoms
The quantum well as before consisted of stacked blocks of an indium gallium arsenide compound separated by barriers of gallium arsenide. t s a unique solid-state environment where many-body effects completely dominate the dynamics of the systemkono says. hen a strong magnetic field is applied electrons
and tested a new approach to cloakingâ##by surrounding an object with small antennas that collectively radiate an electromagnetic field.
and bounce back to your radar detector you detect the mailbox. Eleftheriades and Phd student Michael Selvanyagam s system wraps the mailbox in a layer of tiny antennas that radiate a field away from the box cancelling out any waves that would bounce back.
In this way the mailbox becomes undetectable to radar. e ve demonstrated a different way of doing itsays Eleftheriades. t s very simple:
instead of surrounding what you re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell we surround it with one layer of tiny antennas
and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object. heir experimental demonstration effectively cloaked a metal cylinder from radio waves using one layer of loop antennas.
Currently the antenna loops must be attuned manually to the electromagnetic frequency they need to cancel
but in future they could function both as sensors and active antennas adjusting to different waves in real time much like the technology behind noise-canceling headphones Work on developing a functional invisibility cloak began around 2006
but early systems were necessarily large and clunkyâ##if you wanted to cloak a car for example in practice you would have to completely envelop the vehicle in many layers of metamaterials in order to effectively hieldit from electromagnetic radiation.
or light waves could use the same principle as the necessary antenna technology matures. here are more applications for radio than for lightsays Eleftheriades. t s just a matter of technologyâ##you can use the same principle for light
and the corresponding antenna technology is a very hot area of research. h
#New giant clam species hid in plain sight One type of giant clam turns out to be two separate species report researchers who discovered the new species on reefs in the Solomon islands and at Ningaloo
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
and also has electrical properties superior to the silicon used to make the chips found in modern electronics.
For example Hone explains MEMS sensors figure out how your smartphone or tablet is tilted to rotate the screen.
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.
and then retrieved the musical signals again using an ordinary FM radio receiver. his device is by far the smallest system that can create such FM signalssays Hone.
and processing radio-frequency signals are much harder to miniaturizesays project co-leader Kenneth Shepard an electrical engineering professor. hese off-chip components take up a lot of space and electrical power.
and easily integrated with other types of electronics 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.
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.
A Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2012 and the US Air force supported the project. Source: Columbia Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license t
The secret is a stretchy polymer that coats the electrode binds it together and spontaneously heals tiny cracks that develop during battery operation. elf-healing is very important for the survival and long lifetimes of animals
whose group has been working on flexible electronic skin for use in robots sensors prosthetic limbs and other applications.
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 from all our data it looks like it s working. esearchers worldwide are racing to find ways to store more energy in the negative electrodes of lithium ion batteries to achieve higher performance while reducing weight.
One of the most promising electrode materials is silicon; it has a high capacity for soaking up lithium ions from the battery fluid during charging
This is a problem for all electrodes in high-capacity batteries says Hui Wu a former Stanford postdoc who is now a faculty member at Tsinghua University in Beijing
The self-healing electrode which is made from silicon microparticles that are used widely in the semiconductor
The researchers think this approach could work for other electrode materials as well and they will continue to refine the technique to improve the silicon electrode s performance and longevity.
They detailed the results in an article published in the journal Nature Chemistry. The Department of energy through SLAC s Laboratory Directed Research and development program
#Russian meteor was a wake-up call University of California Davis rightoriginal Studyposted by Andy Fell-UC Davis on November 18 2013consumer video cameras
#Solvent safely turns semiconductors into ink University of Southern California rightoriginal Studyposted by Robert Perkins-USC on November 13 2013a new solvent can dissolve semiconductors safely and at room temperature.
Once dissolved the semiconductor solution can be applied as a thin film to substrates like glass and silicon.
Once heated the solvent evaporates leaving behind only a high-quality film of crystalline semiconductor##perfect for use in electronics. t s inexpensive and easily scalablesays Richard Brutchey a chemistry professor at the University of Southern
ur chemical understanding of the solvent system and how it works should allow us to expand it to the dissolution of a wide range of materials. hile the technology already exists to rintelectronics using semiconductor nksat room temperature the problem until now is that the only substance that could effectively dissolve semiconductors
Brutchey and David Webber of USC mixed two compounds to create the new solvent that effectively dissolves a class of semiconductors known as chalcogenides. hen the two compounds work together they do something quite remarkablesays Brutchey.
and 12-ethylenediamine (a colorless liquid that smells like ammonia) is able to effectively dissolve a series of nine semiconductors made from combinations of arsenic antimony bismuth sulfur selenium and tellurium.
Such semiconductors are used often in lasers optics and infrared detectors. The National Science Foundation and USC funded the work.
and earth-abundant elements unlike compound semiconductor materials currently used in efficient thin-film solar cell technology. he research was supported by the Energy Commercialization Institute of Ben Franklin Technology Partners the Department of energy's Office of Basic Sciences
#Calculations find best phosphors for better LEDS University of California Santa barbara rightoriginal Studyposted by Sonia Fernandez-UCSB on November 12 2013new research makes it possible to optimize phosphorsâ##a key component in white
LED lightingâ##allowing for brighter more efficient lights. hese guidelines should permit the discovery of new and improved phosphors in a rational rather than trial-and-error mannersays Ram Seshadri a professor in the department of materials at University
and postdoctoral associate researcher Jakoah Brgoch appear in The Journal of Physical chemistry C. LED (light-emitting diode) lighting has been a major topic of research due to the many benefits it offers over traditional incandescent or fluorescent lighting.
LEDS use less energy emit less heat last longer and are less hazardous to the environment than traditional lighting.
and televisions LED TECHNOLOGY is becoming more popular as it becomes more versatile and brighter. According to Seshadri all of the recent advances in solid-state lighting have come from devices based on gallium nitride LEDS a technology that is largely credited to UC Santa barbara materials professor Shuji Nakamura who invented the first high-brightness
blue LED. In solid-state white lighting technology phosphors are applied to the LED chip in such a way that the photons from the blue gallium nitride LED pass through the phosphor
which converts and mixes the blue light into the green-yellow-orange range of light.
When combined evenly with the blue the green-yellow-orange light yields white light. The notion of multiple colors creating white may seem counterintuitive.
s LEDS become brighter for example as they are used in vehicle front lights they also tend to get warmer
#Photon detector is quantum leap from semiconductors A new superconducting detector array can measure the energy of individual photons.
The design and construction of an instrument based on these arrays as well as an analysis of its commissioning data appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. hat we have made is essentially a hyperspectral video camera with no intrinsic noisesays Ben Mazin assistant professor
of physics at University of California Santa barbara. n a pixel-per-pixel basis it s a quantum leap from semiconductor detectors;
it s as big a leap going from film to semiconductors as it is going from semiconductors to these superconductors.
through near-IR using Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDS. An MKID is a type of superconducting photon detector;
microwave refers to the readout frequency rather than the frequency at which the detectors operate.
MKIDS were developed first a decade ago by Mazin his Ph d. adviser Jonas Zmuidzinas professor of physics at the California Institute of technology and Henry Leduc at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory.
In his lab at UC Santa barbara Mazin has adapted these detectors for the ultraviolet optical and near-IR parts of the spectrum.
which use light to change a chemical emulsionmazin explains. hen we switched from photographic plates to the charge couple devices (CCDS) contained in today s electronics per-pixel performance of the detectors went up by a factor of 20. n the last decade CCDS
and other semiconductor-based detectors for the optical and near-IR have started to hit fundamental limits in their per-pixel performancemazin adds. hey ve gotten about as good as they can get in a given pixel.
The device wirelessly converts the microwave signal to direct current voltage capable of recharging a cell phone battery or other small electronic device according to a report appearing in Applied Physics Letters.
and copper energy conductors wired together on a circuit board to convert microwaves into 7. 3v of electrical energy.
By comparison Universal serial bus (USB) chargers for small electronic devices provide about 5v of power. e were aiming for the highest energy efficiency we could achievesays Hawkes. e had been getting energy efficiency around 6 to 10 percent
Another application could be to improve the energy efficiency of appliances by wirelessly recovering power that is now lost during use. he properties of metamaterials allow for design flexibility not possible with ordinary devices like antennassays Katko. hen traditional antennas are close to each other in space they talk to each other
The small amount of energy generated from these signals might power a sensor network in a remote location such as a mountaintop
what you thought was simple wiring turns out to be transistors that compute informationsmith says. hat s what this finding is like.
They used patch-clamp electrophysiology to attach a microscopic glass pipette electrode filled with a physiological solution to a neuronal dendrite in the brain of a mouse.
The twin inverted pulse radar (TWIPR) is able to distinguish true argetssuch as electronic circuits that can be used in explosive
To test the proposal they applied TWIPR radar pulses to a arget dipole antenna with a diode across its feedpointâ##to distinguish it from lutterepresented by an aluminium plate and a rusty bench clamp.
The antenna is typical of circuitry in devices associated with covert communications espionage or explosives.
or instance certain electronic components can scatter radar signals nonlinearly if driven by a sufficiently strong radar signal in contrast to naturally occurring objects
which tend to scatter linearly. iven that the diode target measures 6 cm in length weighs 2. 8 g costs less than one Euro
#First supercapacitor on a silicon chip could power phones Vanderbilt University rightoriginal Studyposted by David Salisbury-VU on October 24 2013engineers have constructed the first supercapacitor made out of silicon.
In fact it should be possible to construct these power cells out of the excess silicon that exists in the current generation of solar cells sensors mobile phones
and a variety of other electromechanical devices providing a considerable cost savings. f you ask experts about making a supercapacitor out of silicon they will tell you it is a crazy ideasays Cary Pint an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University who headed the development
These properties have allowed commercial supercapacitors which are made out of activated carbon to capture a few niche markets such as storing energy captured by regenerative braking systems on buses
Supercapacitors still lag behind the electrical energy storage capability of lithium-ion batteries so they are too bulky to power most consumer devices.
This allowed them to create surfaces with optimal nanostructures for supercapacitor electrodes but it left them with a major problem.
Silicon is considered generally unsuitable for use in supercapacitors because it reacts readily with some of chemicals in the electrolytes that provide the ions that store the electrical charge.
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 novel supercapacitor design is described in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The graphene layer acts as an atomically thin protective coating.
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.
The supercapacitors would store excess electricity that the cells generate at midday and release it when the demand peaks in the afternoon. ll the things that define us in a modern environment require electricitysays Pint. he more that we can integrate power storage into existing materials
#Tunable antenna could end annoying dropped calls Cornell University rightoriginal Studyposted by Anne Ju-Cornell on October 22 2013.
Like a radio tuned to different stations cell phone antennas have tuning circuits that quickly switch frequencies
when controlled by a voltage applied to a tunable capacitor. Cell phone companies want to improve these circuits to pack more discrete signals into a finite allocation of spectrum
what is perhaps the world s best material for tunable capacitors broadly called a tunable dielectric a special insulator
The new type of tunable dielectric could greatly improve the performance of microwave circuit capacitors found in every cell phone
The tunable dielectric and its properties were envisioned first on paper tested on the computer created in the lab atom by atom patterned into a capacitor device
The result is a tunable dielectric capacitor with at least five times the performance of commercial tunable capacitors available today according to Schlom.
which keep them away from the ricksdrastically improving the performance of this new variety of tunable capacitors.
A typical solar cell has a silicon semiconductor that absorbs sunlight directly and converts it into electrical energy.
But silicon semiconductors only respond to infrared light. Higher energy light waves including most of the visible light spectrum are wasted as heat
#There s a thermostat that stops neurons from spazzing out Brandeis University rightoriginal Studyposted by Leah Burrows-Brandeis on October 17 2013for the first time scientists have seen evidence in a living animal of a hermostatthat controls
Scientists have theorized long a larger internal system monitors these individual gauges like a neural thermostat regulating average firing rates across the whole brain.
Without this thermostat they reasoned our flexible neurons would fire out of control making bad connections or none at all.
The average firing rate is regulated so well by this neural thermostat that the rates do not change between periods of sleep and wakefulness.
For example NOAA relies on acoustic waves to send data from tsunami sensors on the sea floor to surface buoys.
and planned underwater sensor networks to laptops smartphones and other wireless devices in real time. Melodia tested the system recently in Lake erie a few miles south of downtown Buffalo.
Hovannes Kulhandjian and Zahed Hossain both doctoral candidates in his lab dropped two 40-pound sensors into the water.
and potentially eliminate the duplicative deployments of sensors and other equipment he says. There are also military and law enforcement applications.
An improved more robust underwater sensor network could help spot these vessels. The framework could also be useful to the energy industry
#Tiny water sensor embedded in plant stems Cornell University Posted by Krishna Ramanujan-Cornell on October 14 2013researchers are completing soil tests on a water sensor within a fingertip-sized silicon chip
They hope to mass produce the sensors for as little as $5 each. Crop growers wine grape and other fruit growers food processors and even concrete makers all benefit from water sensors for accurate steady and numerous moisture readings.
But current sensors are large may cost thousands of dollars and often must be read manually.
The new chip which is a hundred times more sensitive than current devices is fitted with wires that can be hooked up to a card for wireless data transmission
or is compatible with existing dataloggers. Chips may be left in place for years though they may break in freezing temperatures.
Such inexpensive and accurate sensors can be spaced strategically in plants and soil for accurate measurements in agricultural fields.
For example sophisticated vintners use precise irrigation to put regulated water stress on grapevines to create just the right grape composition for a premium cabernet or a chardonnay wine.
While growers can use the sensors to monitor water in soils for their crops civil engineers can embed the chips in concrete to determine optimal moisture levels as the concrete cures. ne of our goals is to try
and develop something that is not only a great improvement but also much cheaper for growers and others to usesays Alan Lakso professor of horticulture at Cornell University.
The sensors make use of microfluidic technologyâ##developed by Abraham Stroock associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineeringâ##that places a tiny cavity inside the chip.
and then the chip may be inserted in a plant stem or in the soil where it through a nanoporous membrane exchanges moisture with its environment and maintains an equilibrium pressure that the chip measures.
Using chips embedded in plants or spaced across soil and linked wirelessly to computers allows growers toâ ontrol the precise moisture of blocks of land based on target goalssays Vinay Pagay who helped develop the chip as a doctoral student in Lakso s lab
. The Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise and Commercialization is handling the intellectual property rights and patents.
Source: Cornell Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license
In medicine such networks could serve as martdrug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.
In the accelerator-on-a-chip experiments electrons are accelerated first to near light-speed in a conventional accelerator.
Then they are focused into a tiny half-micron-high channel within a glass chip just half a millimeter long.
Turning the accelerator on a chip into a full-fledged tabletop accelerator will require a more compact way to get the electrons up to speed before they enter the device.
#Tiny optical tuning fork fits on a chip California Institute of technology rightoriginal Studyposted by Jessica Stoller-Conrad-Caltech on September 27 2013researchers have created an optical equivalent of a tuning fork that can help steady electronic currents
needed to power high-end electronics and stabilize signals of high-quality lasers. Itâ#the first time such a device has been miniaturized to fit on a chip
and may pave the way for improvements in high-speed communication navigation and remote sensing. hen you re tuning a piano a tuning fork gives a standardized pitch or reference sound frequency;
and electronic devices when it is used as a reference. good tuning fork controls the release of its acoustical energy ringing just one pitch at a particular sound frequency for a long timeâ##a sustaining property called the quality factor.
The researchers were able to stabilize the light s frequency by developing a silica glass chip resonator with a specially designed path for the photons in the shape of
what is called an Archimedean spiral. sing this shape allows the longest path in the smallest area on a chip.
In combination with the resonator a special guide for the light was used losing 100 times less energy than the average chip-based device.
In addition to its use as a frequency reference for lasers a reference cavity could one day play a role equivalent to that of the ubiquitous quartz crystal in electronics.
Most electronics systems use a device called an oscillator to provide power at very precise frequencies.
While these optical oscillators are currently too large for use in small electronics there is an effort under way to miniaturize their key subcomponentsâ##like Vahala s chip-based reference cavity. miniaturized optical oscillator will represent a shift in the traditional
and electronics. urrently electronics perform signal processing while photonics rule in transporting information from one place to another over fiber-optic cable.
Eventually oscillators in high-performance electronics systems while outwardly appearing to be electronic devices will internally be purely opticalvahala says. he technology that Kerry
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