A research team from Penn State has broken a 165-year-old law of thermal radiation with unprecedented strength, setting the stage for more efficient energy harvesting, heat transfer and infrared sensing.
Category: energy – Page 2
Three-mode smart window cut indoor temperature by 27°C and eliminate urban glare
In the building sector, which accounts for approximately 40% of global energy consumption, heat ingress through windows has been identified as a primary cause of wasted heating and cooling energy.
A KAIST research team has successfully developed a ‘pedestrian-friendly smart window’ technology capable of not only reducing heating and cooling energy in urban buildings but also resolving the persistent issue of ‘light pollution’ in urban living.
Professor Hong Chul Moon’s research team at KAIST’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering have developed a ‘smart window technology’ that allows users to control the light and heat entering through windows according to their intent, and effectively neutralize glare from external sources.
A framework for realizing a microscopic, highly precise and energy-efficient quantum clock
Over the past decades, physicists have been trying to develop increasingly sophisticated and precise clocks to reliably measure the duration of physical processes that unfold over very short periods of time, helping to validate various theoretical predictions. These include so-called quantum clocks, timekeeping systems that leverage the principles of quantum mechanics to measure time with extremely high precision.
DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming
Previously, the greatest reported distance records for an appreciable amount of optical power (1 microwatt) were 230 watts of average power at 1.7 kilometers for 25 seconds and a lesser (but undisclosed) amount of power at 3.7 kilometers.
“It is beyond a doubt that we absolutely obliterated all previously reported optical power beaming demonstrations for power and distance,” said POWER Program Manager Paul Jaffe after the results were confirmed. The DARPA-led team brought together industry and government, including the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (HELSTF) at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range.
Energy is a fundamental requirement for military operations, and traditional means of getting energy to the edge (battlefields, disaster zones, etc.) are often incredibly slow, risky, and resource intensive. These tests, referred to as PRAD (POWER Receiver Array Demo), mark an important step towards the POWER program’s long-term goal of being able to instantly beam power from a location where it can be easily generated to wherever it’s needed, opening a novel design space for platform capabilities unbounded by fuel limitations.
Scientists harness vacuum fluctuations to engineer quantum materials
Vacuum is often thought of as empty, but in fact it is teeming with fleeting energy fluctuations—virtual photons popping in and out of existence that can interact with matter, giving rise to new, potentially useful properties.
Researchers use optical cavities, structures made of mirrors facing one another, to confine these fluctuations, harnessing their effects to engineer new forms of matter.
Conventional optical cavities boost fluctuations, or vacuum fields, for both right-and left-handed circularly polarized light. Rice University researchers and collaborators have developed a new cavity design that selectively enhances the quantum vacuum fluctuations of circularly polarized light in a single direction, achieving chirality—a feat that typically requires the use of a strong magnetic field.
World’s First Hybrid Betavoltaic Cell Promises Decades of Power Without Charging
Scientists have achieved a major breakthrough by creating the world’s first next-generation betavoltaic cell. This advanced power source was made by directly connecting a radioactive isotope electrode to a perovskite absorber layer, a cutting-edge material known for its efficiency.
To boost performance, the team embedded carbon-14-based quantum dots into the electrode and improved the structure of the perovskite layer. These innovations led to a highly stable power output and impressive energy conversion efficiency.
The findings were published in the journal Chemical Communications and led by Professor Su-Il In of the Department of Energy Science & Engineering at DGIST (President Kunwoo Lee).
MXene-polymer composite enables printed, eco-friendly device for energy harvesting and motion sensing
Researchers at Boise State University have developed a novel, environmentally friendly triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that is fully printed and capable of harvesting biomechanical and environmental energy while also functioning as a real-time motion sensor. The innovation leverages a composite of Poly (vinyl butyral-co-vinyl alcohol-co-vinyl acetate) (PVBVA) and MXene (Ti3C2Tx) nanosheets, offering a sustainable alternative to conventional TENGs that often rely on fluorinated polymers and complex fabrication.
