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Category: solar power – Page 139

A revolutionary and emerging class of energy-harvesting computer systems require neither a battery nor a power outlet to operate, instead operating by harvesting energy from their environment. While radio waves, solar energy, heat, and vibrations have the ability to power devices, harvested energy sources are weak leading to an “intermittent execution”, with periodic power failures and unreliable behavior.

Brandon Lucia, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D. student Alexei Colin created the first designed to build reliable software for intermittent, energy-harvesting computers. Colin will present the work at the 2016 SPLASH conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on November 3rd.

“Energy is not always available in the environment for a device to harvest,” explains Lucia. “Intermittent operation makes it difficult to build applications because existing software programming languages—and programmers themselves—assume that energy is a continuously available resource.”

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Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata, India, have for the first time implemented a bio-waste-derived electrode as cathode in a quantum-dot-sensitized solar cell.

“The materials to be used as cathode in quantum dot solar cells need to be highly catalytic and electrically conducting to facilitate the electron transfer processes,” explains Professor Sayan Bhattacharyya from the Department of Chemical Sciences at IISER. He adds that the lamellar structure of human hair is likely responsible for the graphene-like sheets in the transformed graphitic porous carbon. “Secondly,” he continues, “since hair contains keratin and other amino acids, carbonizing the acid-digested hair under inert conditions likely retains the nitrogen and sulphur hetero-atoms, which are useful to enhance the catalytic propensity of the produced carbon.”

As the professor explains, the idea behind this research project was to use a bio-waste resource like hair in future energy technologies to achieve a win-win situation — i.e., “A smart way to address environmental concerns and also to produce cheaper devices.”

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Patches of chain-like molecules placed across nanoscale particles can radically transform the optical, electronic, and magnetic properties of particle-based materials. Understanding why depends critically on the three-dimensional features of these “polymer nano-patches”—which are tantalizingly difficult to reveal at a scale spanning just billionths of a meter.

Now, scientists have used cutting-edge electron tomography techniques—a process of 3D reconstructive imaging —to pinpoint the structure and composition of the polymer nano-patches. The results, published earlier this month in the journal Nature, “lay the foundation for new nanoscale architectures that could potentially enhance technologies such as self-assembled solar cells and catalysts,” said lead author Eugenia Kumacheva of the University of Toronto.

The scientists tracked the patches formed by different synthetic polymers—versatile and common compounds used in everything from plastics to electronics —on the surface of gold nanospheres thousands of times smaller than the width of a single human hair. To visualize the elusive surface structures, Kumacheva and her team turned to cutting-edge facilities at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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The sun provides more than enough energy in just one hour to supply our planet’s energy needs for an entire year. Your home can capture this free, abundant energy source through rooftop solar tiles, turning sunlight into electricity for immediate use or storage in a Powerwall battery.

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Maanasa Mendu thinks she’s cracked the code on how to make wind and solar energy affordable.

On Tuesday, Mendu, a 13-year-old from Ohio, won the grand prize in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for her work in creating a cost-effective “solar leaves” design to create energy. In addition to winning the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist,” she gets $25,000 for her achievement.

The leaves, designed to help developing areas in need of cheaper power sources, cost roughly $5 to make.

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A new design for solar cells that uses inexpensive, commonly available materials could rival and even outperform conventional cells made of silicon.

Writing in the Oct. 21 edition of Science, researchers from Stanford and Oxford describe using tin and other abundant elements to create novel forms of perovskite — a photovoltaic crystalline material that’s thinner, more flexible and easier to manufacture than silicon crystals.

“Perovskite semiconductors have shown great promise for making high-efficiency solar cells at low cost,” said study co-author Michael McGehee, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford. “We have designed a robust, all-perovskite device that converts sunlight into electricity with an efficiency of 20.3 percent, a rate comparable to silicon solar cells on the market today.”

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If there is any organization on the planet that has had a closer view of the coming demise of Moore’s Law, it is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Since its inception in the 1960s, the wide range of industry professionals have been able to trace a steady trajectory for semiconductors, but given the limitations ahead, it is time to look to a new path—or several forks, to be more accurate.

This realization about the state of computing for the next decade and beyond has spurred action from a subgroup, led by Georgia Tech professor Tom Conte and superconducting electronics researcher, Elie Track called “Rebooting Computing,” which produces reports based on invite-only deep dives on a wide range of post-Moore’s Law technologies, many of which were cited here this week via Europe’s effort to pinpoint future post-exascale architectures. The Rebooting Computing effort is opening its doors next week for a wider-reaching, open forum in San Diego to bring together new ideas in novel architectures and modes of computing as well as on the applications and algorithm development fronts.

According to co-chair of the Rebooting Computing effort, Elie Track, a former Yale physicist who has turned his superconducting circuits work toward high efficiency solar cells in his role at startup Nvizix, Moore’s Law is unquestionably dead. “There is no known technology that can keep packing more density and features into a given space and further, the real issue is power dissipation. We just cannot keep reducing things further; a fresh perspective is needed.” The problem with gaining that view, however, is that for now it means taking a broad, sweeping look across many emerging areas; from quantum and neuromorphic devices, approximate computing, and a wide range of other technologies. “It might seem frustrating that this is general, but there is no clear way forward yet. What we all agree on is that we need exponential growth in computing engines.”

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