Category Technology/Electronics

Turning brewery wastewater into battery power

CU Boulder engineers have developed an innovative bio-manufacturing process that uses a biological organism cultivated in brewery wastewater to create the carbon-based materials needed to make energy storage cells. This unique pairing of breweries and batteries could set up a win-win opportunity by reducing expensive wastewater treatment costs for beer makers while providing manufacturers with a more cost-effective means of creating renewable, naturally-derived fuel cell technologies.

“Breweries use about 7 barrels of water for every barrel of beer produced,” said Tyler Huggins, CU Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “And they can’t just dump it into the sewer because it requires extra filtration...

Schematic of a transistor with a molybdenum disulfide channel and 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate. Credit: Sujay Desai/UC Berkeley

Research breaks major barrier in transistor size by creating gate only 1nm long. For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5nm threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about 1/4 the size of high-end 20nm-gate transistors now on the market.

“We made the smallest transistor reported to date,” said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division. “The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor...

This image shows a new efficient and low-cost method for hydrogenation of graphene with visible light. Credit: Joakim Bergman, AstraZeneca

“The reaction is convenient and cheap, and hydrogenated graphene may be applied within areas such as hydrogen storage. Additionally, upon functionalization of graphene one can open a bandgap and this fact is of high relevance for electronics applications,” says Prof. Henrik Ottosson.

Graphene reacts with formic acid in a water solution upon irradiation with visible light. In the reaction, formic acid acts as masked hydrogen and a material is produced where hydrogen extensively has been added to graphene. One says that graphene has been hydrogenated. Yet, graphene research is a side-project in Henrik Ottosson’s group...

This is an artist view of the shape of an electron in a high-temperature superconductor, which was measured in the work by Dalla Torre et al. The blue and red spheres represent Copper and Oxygen atoms, and the colored surface the positive (blue) and negative (red) parts of the wave describing the electron. Credit: Mario Sermoneta

A recent discovery provides an innovative technique for calculating the shapes of electrons. This finding will help scientists gain a better, faster understanding of the properties of complex materials. Dr. Emanuele Dalla Torre et al used holographic logic to compile an algorithm for visualizing the shape of an electron in a superconducting material...