Category Technology/Electronics

Literal flexibility may bring the power of a new transistor developed at UW–Madison to digital devices that bend and move. PHOTO COURTESY OF JUNG-HUN SEO, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

A team of UW-M engineers has created the most functional flexible transistor in the world – and with it, a fast, simple and inexpensive fabrication process that’s easily scalable to the commercial level. It’s an advance that could open the door to an increasingly interconnected world, enabling manufacturers to add “smart,” wireless capabilities to any number of large or small products or objects – like wearable sensors and computers for people and animals – that curve, bend, stretch and move.

Transistors are ubiquitous building blocks of modern electronics...

TE ink printed in various shapes with curves and straight lines.
Credit: UNIST Wearable solar thermoelectric generator driven by unprecedentedly high temperature difference. Nano Energy, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2017.08.061

Engineers have introduced a new advanced energy harvesting system, capable of generating electricity by simply being attached to clothes, windows, and outer walls of a building. This new device is based on a temperature difference between the hot and cold sides. The temperature difference can be increased as high as 20.9 °C, which is much higher than the typical temperature differences of 1.5 to 4.1 °C of wearable thermoelectric generators driven by body heat...

Partial breaking of the Coulombic ordering of ionic liquids confined in carbon nanopores. Nature Materials, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nmat4974

Scientists have taken a big step towards creating the next generation of batteries, as well as more effective water treatment and better alternative energy after defying one of nature’s most fundamental rules on an atomic scale. The international team has found a way to avoid the established principle that particles of the same charge repel each other – and opposite charges attract.

Charged atoms or molecules (ions) normally take on what is called Coulombic ordering where they sequence themselves in positive and negative succession along a straight line...

This is an image of diamonds with different properties ready to be measured. Credit: Dima Farfurnik

Simple method can give diamonds the special properties needed for quantum applications such as sensing magnetic fields. When a nitrogen atom is next to the space vacated by a carbon atom, it forms what is called a nitrogen-vacancy center. Now, researchers have shown how they can create more NV centers, which makes sensing magnetic fields easier, using a relatively simple method that can be done in many labs.

Pure diamond consists of carbon atoms in a perfect crystal lattice. But remove a few carbons and swap some others for nitrogen, and you get a diamond with special quantum-sensing properties...