Category Technology/Electronics

Luminescent solar concentrators serving as semitransparent photovoltaic windows could become an important element in net zero energy consumption buildings of the future. Photovoltaic hardware has to absorb light in order to work, and a typical silicon panel appears black. So, to put any of that hardware (and its supporting wiring) into a window that doesn’t block the view is rather challenging. One option is to use materials that only capture a part of the solar spectrum, but these tend to leave the light that enters the building with a distinctive tint.

The new hardware takes a very different approach. The entire window is filled with a diffuse cloud of quantum dots that absorb almost all of the solar spectrum...

Concept of electrocuring adhesive.

Inspired by limitations of biomimetic glues in wet environments Voltaglue has many apps incl:
– gluing metal panels under water eg underwater pipe repairs;
– Replacing sutures when there is a need to join body tissues together during surgery;
– Tailoring the properties of the adhesive to be more gel-like or rubber-like which would work well in vibrating or damp environments

In future, surgeons could use biocompatible glue patches to join 2 pieces of internal body tissue together in 1-2 minutes, instead of sutures which often require 15 to 20 minutes of careful stitching. Assistant Professor Terry Steele said it took them over a year to develop an adhesive that could work under wet conditions such as in the human body or underwater.

Diazirine electrochemis...

Physicists build stable diffraction structure in atomically thin graphene.
The quantum mechanical wave nature of matter is the basis for a number of modern technologies like high resolution electron microscopy, neutron-based studies on solid state materials or highly sensitive inertial sensors working with atoms. Prof. Markus Arndt group focused on how one can extend such technologies to large molecules and cluster.

In order to demonstrate the quantum mechanical nature of a massive object it has to be delocalized first >> achieved by Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation: If molecules are emitted from a point-like source, they start to ‘forget’ their position after a while and delocalize...

Artificial photosynthesis used to produce renewable molecular hydrogen for synthesizing carbon dioxide into methane. Credit: Berkeley Lab

Researchers using a bioinorganic hybrid approach to artificial photosynthesis have combined semiconducting nanowires with select microbes to create a system that produces renewable H2 and uses it to synthesize CO2 into methane, the primary constituent of natural gas.

“By generating renewable hydrogen and feeding it to microbes for the production of methane, we can now expect an electrical-to-chemical efficiency of better than 50% and a solar-to-chemical energy conversion efficiency of 10% if our system is coupled with state-of-art solar panel and electrolyzer.”

The concept in the 2 studies is essentially the same – a membrane of semiconductor nanowires t...