Category Physics

—promising 3rd-gen solar cells utilizing a nanocrystal ink deposition that could make traditional expensive silicon-based solar panels a thing of the past. While progress on organic thin-film photovoltaics is rapidly growing, inorganic devices still hold the record for highest efficiencies which is in part due to their broad spectral absorption and excellent electronic properties.

A major disadvantage compared to organics, however, is that inorganic materials are difficult to deposit from solution. To overcome this, Townsend synthesized materials on the nanoscale. Inorganic nanocrystals encased in an organic ligand shell are soluble in organic solvents and can be deposited from solution (i.e...

Instead of ending up in landfills, old tires can supply a key ingredient for supercapacitors to help power the nation. Credit: ORNL

By employing proprietary pretreatment and processing, a team led by Parans Paranthaman has created flexible polymer carbon composite films as electrodes for supercapacitors. These devices are useful in applications for cars, buses and forklifts that require rapid charge and discharge cycles with high power and high energy density. Supercapacitors with this technology in electrodes saw just a 2% drop after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.

The technology follows an ORNL discovery of a method to use scrap tires for batteries. Together, these approaches could provide some relief to the problems associated with the 1...

Ultrathin sheets of a new 2-D hybrid perovskite are square-shaped and relatively large in area, properties that should facilitate their integration into future electronic devices. Credit: Courtesy of Peidong Yang, Berkeley Lab

These ionic materials exhibit optical properties not found in 2D covalent semiconductors eg graphene, making them promising alternatives to silicon for future electronic devices. To the growing list of 2D semiconductors, eg graphene, boron nitride, and molybdenum disulfide, whose unique electronic properties make them potential successors to silicon in future devices, you can now add hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites...

The patented new system harnesses a unique mixture of technologies to pre-heat domestic hot water for radiators, baths and showers while also generating electricity. More than half of domestic energy use in the UK is to heat water. At its heart is the use of heat pipes – superconductors of heat energy – found in high tech devices from PCs to the International Space Station where they prevent it from melting in the heat of the sun on one side and freezing in the vacuum of space on the other.

“Until now there was no system which fully addressed all the technical and practical issues that face making an entire building’s roof a solar-powered generator of both heat energy and electrical energy...