One of the solar energy market’s most promising solar cell materials—perovskite—is also the most frustrating. A research team in Sweden reports a possible solution to the environmental instability of perovskite—an alternative to silicon that’s cheap and highly efficient, yet degrades dramatically when exposed to moisture. The team, from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, developed a new synthetic alloy that increases perovskite cells’ durability while preserving energy conversion performance. The researchers published their findings in Nature’s Communications Materials. “Perovskite…
… through use of pre-existing defects in semiconductor materials. The discovery demonstrates a practical method to overcome current challenges in the manufacture of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) LEDs with considerably higher indium concentration, through the formation of quantum dots that emit long-wavelength light. Researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, together with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), National University of Singapore (NUS) and…
To limit climate change, joint global efforts are needed and international alliances must be forged. Coordinated by Dr. Paul Jerabek (Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon) and Prof. Sally Brooker (University of Otago in Dunedin), a bilateral hydrogen alliance between New Zealand and Germany is now starting its work. Its goal is to establish a German-New Zealand research presence in New Zealand for research and further development of green hydrogen technologies. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research…
The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE is developing refrigeration circuits for heat pumps which shall operate as efficiently as possible with low amounts of the climate-friendly refrigerant propane. This research is carried out in project “LC150 – Development of a Refrigerant-reduced Heat Pump Module with Propane”, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy BMWi. In an automated cross-evaluation, a team from the institute is testing various components of heat pumps on the large scale,…
From birds in the sky to fish in the sea, nature’s creatures possess characteristics naturally perfected over millennia. Studying them leads engineers to create new technologies that are essential to our way of life today. Mechanical engineers from Michigan Technological University share how they built a tiny, self-powered robot inspired by water-skimming insects. “Bio-inspired robotic technologies push the boundaries of what we think is possible when it comes to traveling on land, in the air and underwater,” said Hassan Masoud,…
As a robotics engineer, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, gets her inspiration from biological systems. The collective behaviors of ants, honeybees and birds to solve problems and overcome obstacles is something researchers have developed in aerial and underwater robotics. Developing small-scale swarm robots with the capability to traverse complex terrain, however, comes with a unique set of challenges. In research published in Science Robotics, Ozkan-Aydin presents how she was able to build multi-legged robots capable of…
Landshut University of Applied Sciences develops a contactless, fast temperature measuring device for the steel industry that is designed to reduce energy and production costs and improve product quality. Steel is needed to make machines or tools. The steel is machined, formed and pressed at high temperatures. The temperature must also be kept constant and closely monitored during many processing steps. If this is not the case, it can lead to defective components and high costs for reworking. To prevent…
New measurements show that fast flows in a tokamak plasma help remove and prevent impurities. The Science Impurities in the plasmas in fusion tokamaks can reduce performance. These impurities are created by interactions between the hot plasma and the metal tokamak walls. These walls are often armored with tungsten. This material resists heat, but degrades over time, releasing impurities into the plasma. Simulations predict how these impurities behave, but they are difficult to measure directly because many impurities only emit weak levels of radiation. The…
New research demonstrates great promise of all-inorganic perovskite solar cells for improving the efficiencies of solar cells. Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites have already demonstrated very high photovoltaic efficiencies of greater than 25%. The prevailing wisdom in the field is that the organic (carbon- and hydrogen-containing) molecules in the material are crucial to achieving this impressive performance because they are believed to suppress defect-assisted carrier recombination. New research in the UC Santa Barbara materials department has shown not only that this assumption…
A method that combines screen-printable composite and metallic inks could make foldable electronics easier and cheaper to manufacture at industrial scales. These devices, developed at KAUST, can be mounted on various supports, including nonplanar surfaces, and could enable many Internet of Things applications. Next-generation technology such as automotive radars for self-driving cars, smart buildings and wearable sensors will depend more heavily on the high-frequency millimeter-wave band, including 5G. To date, large-scale manufacturing approaches to make foldable electronics have focused on…
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are funding five trilateral projects for the transfer of knowledge from DFG-funded research to industry. The alliance between universities, Fraunhofer institutes and companies is being supported with a total of around 4.5 million euros for the duration of three years. One of the projects is the “MEMS-based parametric amplifier for range optimization of wireless sensor networks”, in which the Technical University of Hamburg together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic…
”Prometheus” and “Chephren”: Fraunhofer IWS works on machines that barely lose energy in the form of waste heat. Nearly frictionless motors and gearboxes shall ensure electric bicycles with greater range on a single battery charge as well as industrial machines with significantly lower power consumption in form of friction and waste heat. The Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS Dresden is collaborating with industry and research partners in the joint projects “Prometheus” and “Chephren”. The researchers want to…
Fifty-five percent of the final energy consumption in Germany are expended for heating and air conditioning. Vacuum technologies developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology FEP are used to deposit layers and layer systems serving the exploitation of solar energy and the storage of heat on an industrial scale, contributing to the increased use of this important energy source. The radiant energy that the earth receives from the sun within 90 minutes is roughly…
LEO carves out a new type of locomotion somewhere between walking and flying. Researchers at Caltech have built a bipedal robot that combines walking with flying to create a new type of locomotion, making it exceptionally nimble and capable of complex movements. Part walking robot, part flying drone, the newly developed LEONARDO (short for LEgs ONboARD drOne, or LEO for short) can walk a slackline, hop, and even ride a skateboard. Developed by a team at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous…
Controlling the structure of fragmented electrodes composed of carbon nanotubes could offer improved wireless monitoring of the strain on materials in a wide range of applications. “This opens endless possibilities for every situation where accurate wireless monitoring of structures is important,” says Gilles Lubineau, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at KAUST. Lubineau developed the technology with postdoc Hussein Nesser, who adds: “Our sensor can directly be used to assess, in-situ and with great accuracy, the strain exerted on materials.” Monitoring the strains…
In a new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances; DOI 10.29026/oea.2021.200064, Researchers led by Professor Xu Chunxiang, Southeast University, Nanjing, China discuss nano-buffer controlled electron tunneling to regulate heterojunctional interface emission. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) are widely used in the field of lighting and display. Homojunction is the best choice when considering interface loss and carrier concentration matching. However, for some semiconductor materials, where it is difficult to obtain homojunction, energy level matching heterostructure is also a choice to build LEDs. Compared with…
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