Power and Electrical Engineering
This topic covers issues related to energy generation, conversion, transportation and consumption and how the industry is addressing the challenge of energy efficiency in general.
innovations-report provides in-depth and informative reports and articles on subjects ranging from wind energy, fuel cell technology, solar energy, geothermal energy, petroleum, gas, nuclear engineering, alternative energy and energy efficiency to fusion, hydrogen and superconductor technologies.
Researchers look at soy oil to replace petroleum for a range of products
Virginia Tech researchers are mixing air and soybean oil to create new polymers to replace petroleum-based materials.
“These natural polymers could be used in biocompatible or biodegradable ways,” says Tim Long of Blacksburg, chemistry professor in the College of Science at Virginia Tech. “We are looking for natural products derived in the United States.”
Ann R. Fornof of Toledo, Ohio, a graduate student in Virginia Tech’s Macromolecular and Science Engineering program, will
Research explains how to boost efficiency of polymer organic light-emitting diodes
Biasing spin statistics
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) based on pi-conjugated polymers offer significant advantages over other display materials. They are lightweight, flexible, easily tailored, operate on low voltages and can be deposited on large areas using simple techniques such as ink-jet printing or spin-coating.
By combining the electrical properties of metals and semiconductors with the mechanical properties of plastics, these materials are poised to provide a
Duke chemists describe new kind of ’nanotube’ transistor
Duke University researchers exploring ways to build ultrasmall electronic devices out of atom-thick carbon cylinders have incorporated one of these “carbon nanotubes” into a new kind of field effect transistor. The Duke investigators also reported new insights into their previously published technique for growing nanotubes in straight structures as long as half an inch.
Duke assistant chemistry professor Jie Liu will report on these and other nanotube developments during three talks at a na
Bright light yields unusual vibes
By bombarding very thin slices of several copper/oxygen compounds, called cuprates, with very bright, short-lived pulses of light, Ivan Bozovic, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and his collaborators have discovered an unusual property of the materials: After absorbing the light energy, they emit it as long-lived sound waves, as opposed to heat energy. This result may open up a new field of study on cuprates — materials already used in wireless comm
Carbon nanotubes with big possibilities
A scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, working with colleagues at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, has caused an individual carbon nanotube to emit light for the first time. This step in research on carbon nanotubes may help to materialize many of the proposed applications for carbon nanotubes, such as in electronics and photonics development.
The light emission is the result of a process called “electron-hole recombination.” By running an el
Another Twist in the Field of Superconductivity
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered an interesting type of electronic behavior in a recently discovered class of superconductors known as cobalt oxides, or cobaltates. These materials operate quite differently from other oxide superconductors, namely the copper oxides (or cuprates), which are commonly referred to as high-temperature superconductors.
When traditional superconductors are cooled to nearly absolute zero (0 Kelvin or –452