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Category: energy – Page 358

For some time now, graphene has been the wonder material that scientists have been most excited about using: as it develops, it promises to transform everything from night-vision goggles to energy storage. Now researchers across the globe think they’ve come up with a material to rival it: diamond nanothread.

The clues are in the name. This potentially revolutionary, next-generation material is partly made from diamond and is incredibly thin as well as incredibly strong. Technically speaking, we’re looking at a type of carbon (like graphene) taking the form of a one-dimensional diamond crystal that’s topped with hydrogen. To create the material, benzene molecules were stacked together and pressurised.

It’s too early to say how diamond nanothread could be used — right now scientists are still at the research and simulation stage — but one of the appeals of a material like this is its versatility. And a team of scientists working at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia has been looking into the properties of diamond nanothread and think it might be more versatile and robust than originally believed.

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LG really, really wants your next TV, smartwatch, and car to use an OLED panel and, preferably, one that’s come off its new $8.71bn production line. The company’s panel arm, LG Display, has announced a whopping 1.84 trillion South Korean Won investment into a brand new facility dubbed P10, which will cater for what LG predicts will be blockbuster demand for OLED in a range of sizes.

That $8.71bn is only the tip of the iceberg, mind, and the plant — to be constructed in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, Korea — is expected to eventually cost more than five times that amount.

Construction will begin this year, with the initial investment expected to cover the P10 building itself, the foundations for its clean rooms, and the various components of infrastructure for water and power supplies.

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Kool, the sooner we can stop worrying about our effects on the carbon cycle so greatly the better. We can grow algae in the oceans.

Hydrogen is a very clean fuel that is increasingly being used as vehicle fuel and to generate electricity. The problem is how to produce it efficiently without generating significant carbon emissions and at a competitive cost. A team of researchers at Imperial College is currently looking at the problem and think they know how to do it.

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Scientists in the UK have invented a new type of touchscreen material that requires very little power to illuminate, offering up a cheap alternative to today’s smartphone and tablet screens, with vivid colours and high visibility in direct sunlight.

The team is already in talks with some of the world’s largest consumer electronics corporations to see if their new material can replace current LCD touchscreens in the next couple of years, which could spell the end for daily smartphone charging. “We can create an entire new market,” one of the researchers, Peiman Hosseini, told The Telegraph. “You have to charge smartwatches every night, which is slowing adoption. But if you had a smartwatch or smart glass that didn’t need much power, you could recharge it just once a week.”

Developed by Bodie Technologies, a University of Oxford spin-off company, the new display is reportedly made from a type of phase-change material called germanium-antimony-tellurium, or GST. The researchers are being understandably cagey about exactly how it’s made as they shop the technology around, but it’s based on a paper they published last year describing how a rigid or flexible display can be formed from microscopic ‘stacks’ of GST and electrode layers.

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Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind self-healing gel that repairs and connects electronic circuits, creating opportunities to advance the development of flexible electronics, biosensors and batteries as energy storage devices.

Although technology is moving toward lighter, flexible, foldable and rollable electronics, the existing circuits that power them are not built to flex freely and repeatedly self-repair cracks or breaks that can happen from normal wear and tear.

Until now, self-healing materials have relied on application of external stimuli such as light or heat to activate repair. The UT Austin “supergel” material has high conductivity (the degree to which a material conducts electricity) and strong mechanical and electrical self-healing properties.

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Derek Muller of ‘Veritasium’ explores the impact of the Northeast blackout of 2003 and the innovations in energy that are essential to keeping the lights on. For more on the future of energy, check out Breakthrough’s ‘Energy on the Edge’ episode on the National Geographic Channel airing Sunday 11/29 at 9/8c.

Check Out Veritasium’s ‘How Long Will You Live’: http://bit.ly/21fLyDN

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Chinese technology company Huawei has announced that its latest prototype battery fills up with power 10 times quicker than the ones in current smartphones. Huawei has been showing off the technology at the 56th Battery Symposium in Japan this week, where a 3,000mAh pack reached a 48 percent charge in just 5 minutes.

The lithium-ion batteries inside smartphones, tablets, and other similar gadgets have two main sections: an anode and a cathode. Electrons move from one section to the other while our devices are in use, and then back in the opposite direction as they are recharged.

Huawei says it has managed to bond special heteroatoms to the graphite molecules in the anode section of the battery to get this process moving faster, without decreasing energy density or battery life.

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