Category Technology/Electronics

Ruichen Wang with the prototype. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Huddersfield

Boosting the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles by “harvesting” the energy generated by their shock absorbers and feeding it back into batteries or electrical systems such as air conditioning has become a major goal in automotive engineering. Now, a University of Huddersfield researcher has made a breakthrough by designing a new system and constructing a prototype that is ready for real-world testing.

Considerable work has already been done harvesting energy from brake systems, so Dr Wang decided to focus on the suspension...

A figure depicting the structure of stacked memristors with dimensions that could satisfy the Feynman Grand Challenge

In 1959 Richard Feynman, in his talk “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” spoke of a future in which tiny machines could perform huge feats. Like many forward-looking concepts, his molecule and atom-sized world remained for years in the realm of science fiction. And then, scientists and other creative thinkers began to realize Feynman’s nanotechnological visions. In the spirit of Feynman’s insight engineers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a design for a functional nanoscale computing device. The concept involves a dense, 3D circuit operating on an unconventional type of logic that could, theoretically, be packed into a block no bigger than 50 nm on any side.

Key to this devel...

This is an infrared image of metadevice composed of vanadium dioxide with gold patterned mesh. (Top) Device without any electric current showing the PSU cut from the pattern and reflective. (Middle) Device with 2.03 amps

An electric current will not only heat a hybrid metamaterial, but will also trigger it to change state and fade into the background like a chameleon in what may be the proof-of-concept of the first controllable metamaterial device, or metadevice. “Previous metamaterials work focused mainly on cloaking objects so they were invisible in the radio frequency or other specific frequencies,” said Douglas H. Werner, John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professor of electrical engineering, Penn State...