Toronto’s CN Tower acts as a lightning laboratory, teaching scientists how to protect delicate electronic equipment against high-voltage surges, says a new study. Lightning data captured by measurement stations at the CN Tower point to the most effective procedures for protecting sensitive technology in tall buildings or on power lines routed through mountainous terrain. “More and more electronic equipment has very sensitive components,” says study co-author Wasyl Janischewskyj, a profe
The key aspect of the project is the obtaining of metal hydrides with the capacity to “store” the hydrogen used in automotive vehicle fuel batteries.
Under the auspices of the Strategic Plan for Materials and Energy being carried out by INASMET, the Armenian Institute of Chemistry & Physics of the National Academy of Sciences has signed a joint working agreement on order to make progress in one of the future energy sources such as fuel cells based on using hydrogen.
This al
Using STM, researchers demonstrate precise control needed to build molecular electronics
While the semiconductor industry today routinely dopes bulk silicon with billions of atoms of boron or phosphorous to obtain desired electrical properties, a team of physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, has succeeded in changing the properties of a single molecule by doping it just one atom at a time.
“We can precisely change the exact number of dopant atoms attached to a
Printing circuits on sheets of plastic may offer a low-cost technique for manufacturing thin-film transistors for flexible displays, but maximizing the performance of such devices will require a detailed, fundamental understanding of how charge flows through organic semiconductors.
Now, an unusual way of fabricating single-crystal organic transistors has allowed scientists to probe charge transport within the crystals and to observe a strong anisotropy of the charge transport mobility within
A five-kilowatt solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) undergoing testing in Fairbanks has reached the 5,000-hour milestone since its start-up eight months ago. During each hour of operation the fuel cell produces approximately four kilowatts of electricity totaling 20,000 kilowatt hours for the duration, enough to power two average houses for a full year.
“Since the biggest questions surrounding fuel cells have been longevity and reliability, this is an exciting achievement in fuel cell technology
NSF ’sugar’ grant supports single-chamber prototype fed by wastewater
Something big may be brewing on the sewage treatment circuit thanks to a new design that puts bacteria on double-duty-treating wastewater and generating electricity at the same time.
The key is an innovative, single-chambered microbial fuel cell. The prototype is described in the online version of the journal Environmental Science & Technology (http://pubs.acs.org/journals/esthag/); the article w
OGI School of Science & Technology Research is one of a kind in Northwest
Oregon Health & Science University researchers have discovered a new way to accurately grow silicon nanowires on an electrode for use in fabricating transistors. A portion of these findings will be published in the Feb. 23 issue of Applied Physics Letter. The discovery has important implications for semiconductor research and may one day help engineers build faster computer chips.
A research group led
JEMA, the company based in Lasarte in the Basque Country, has recently put into operation the two energy supply plants designed and manufactured for the European EFDA (the European Fusion Development Agreement)-JET nuclear fusion experimental reactor at Culham in the United Kingdom. This reactor is one of the plants on which ITER, the largest research project in the world, has been based.
With this achievement JEMA has carried out more than 2 years of intense work in research, design and con
A Cornell University researcher is developing techniques for making photonic microchips — in which streams of electrons are replaced by beams of light — including ways to guide and bend light in air or a vacuum, to switch a beam of light on and off and to connect nanophotonic chips to optical fiber.
Michal Lipson, an assistant professor at Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., described recent research by the Nanophotonics Group in Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the a
The first reactor capable of producing hydrogen from a renewable fuel source–ethanol–efficiently enough to hold economic potential has been invented by University of Minnesota engineers. When coupled with a hydrogen fuel cell, the unit–small enough to hold in your hand–could generate one kilowatt of power, almost enough to supply an average home, the researchers said. The technology is poised to remove the major stumbling block to the “hydrogen economy”: no free hydrogen exists, except what is ma
A proposed U.S. mission to investigate three ice-covered moons of Jupiter will demand fast-paced research, fabrication and realistic non-nuclear testing of a prototype nuclear reactor within two years, says a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist.
The roots of this build and test effort have been under way at Los Alamos since the mid-1990s, said David Poston, leader of the Space Fission Power Team in Los Alamos’ Nuclear Design and Risk Analysis Group.
NASA proposes using u
European Commission President, Romano Prodi, today launched the “European Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology” Platform, whose Advisory Council includes key players of the European hydrogen sector, at its first assembly in Brussels. The Platform has the task of drafting a blueprint to smooth the EU’s transition from a fossil fuel-based to a hydrogen-based economy. The creation of this platform follows the presentation of a report by an EU high-level expert group on June 16, 2003, and the inclusion of
The first Russian power system based on a solid-oxide fuel cell is tested in Snezhinsk. By importance, this event is comparable with the first automobile construction.
The first Russian power system based on a solid-oxide fuel cell had been tested in the All-Russia Research Institute of Technical Physics (Russian Federal Nuclear Center, Snezhinsk, Chelyabinsk oblast). In this system, hydrogen is obtained from natural gas, and oxygen – from the air. For the first time, such a system ha
A research team from the Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering at the Public University of Navarre has designed nanostructured optical sensors and instrumentation to monitor these sensors, for the United States’ company NanoSonic, which has begun to market the product.
The optic fibre sensors are human hair-sized devices. The Public University of Navarre has developed a humidity sensor and a light source for applications with optic fibre sensors. Moreover, the Navarre team has
Tiny microheaters that can prompt chemical changes in surrounding material may provide the means to more easily grow replacement tissue for injured patients and form the basis for medical sensors that could quickly detect pathogens, according to researchers at the University of Washington who are the first to demonstrate the process.
The key to the technique, according to Associate Professor Karl Böhringer in the UW’s Department of Electrical Engineering, lies in temperature-driven cha
University of Chicago scientists have proposed a new method for storing hydrogen fuel in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The lack of practical storage methods has hindered the more widespread use of hydrogen fuels, which are both renewable and environmentally clean. The most popular storage methods-liquid hydrogen and compressed hydrogen-require that the fuel be kept at extremely low temperatures or high pressures. But the University o
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