Category Technology/Electronics

The new perovskite solar cells have achieved an efficiency of 20.1 per cent and can be manufactured at low temperatures, which reduces the cost and expands the number of possible applications. (Photo: Kevin Soobrian)

Research removes a key barrier to large-scale manufacture of low-cost, printable perovskite solar cells. A U of T Engineering innovation could make printing solar cells as easy and inexpensive as printing a newspaper. “Economies of scale have greatly reduced the cost of silicon manufacturing,” said Professor Ted Sargent, Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. “Perovskite solar cells can enable us to use techniques already established in the printing industry to produce solar cells at very low cost...

Schematic shows the components of a CHAMP cylinder-piston assembly used to create hydrogen from methane and steam via variable volume catalytic reaction. The process also concentrates carbon dioxide emissions from the process. (Credit: David Anderson, Georgia Tech) DOW

When is an internal combustion engine not an internal combustion engine? When it’s been transformed into a modular reforming reactor that could make hydrogen available to power fuel cells wherever there’s a natural gas supply available...

UChicago researchers achieved levitation of macroscopic objects between warm and cold plates in a vacuum chamber. Credit: Chicago Jean Lachat

UChicago undergraduate physics students helped take the levitation science to a new level. 3rd-year Frankie Fung and 4th-year Mykhaylo Usatyuk led a team of UChicago researchers who demonstrated how to levitate a variety of objects – ceramic and polyethylene spheres, glass bubbles, ice particles, lint strands and thistle seeds – between a warm plate and a cold plate in a vacuum chamber. “They made lots of intriguing observations that blew my mind,” said Prof. Cheng Chin, whose ultracold lab in the Gordon Center for Integrative Science was home to the experiments.

In their work, researchers achieved a number of levitation breakthroughs, in terms of du...

Image sensor and lens size comparison. Credit: Simon Thiele

A new study presents a miniaturized camera inspired by the natural vision of predators such as eagles that captures images with a high central acuity. The camera demonstrates for the first time direct, 3D printing of a complex imaging system onto a chip to form a multi-aperture camera. The design has potential applications in areas such as endoscopy, optical sensors, and surveillance drones, and it builds upon the growing field of micro-optics that has been revolutionized by advances in 3D printing. The system presented here involves so-called “foveated imaging,” named after the fovea area of the eye, which gives the highest acuity in vision.

It is based on the idea that since many tasks do not require equal clarity across a field...