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Category: solar power – Page 152

4D Printing: Shaping The Future of Solar Cells

Definitely many benefits to 4D including manufacturing, tech devices, and energy.

A team of researchers has uncovered the key to what they call 4D printing – and solar energy may be one of the top 2 fields to benefit from the great invention.

Did your eyes widen in disbelief with the invention of 3D printing as plastic, ceramic, glass, living cells, and even chocolate were born out of a printer? Now it may seem like yesterday’s news. In a way, it kind of is. The 2D laser printer in your home office is probably looking more and more archaic to you these days – or if you’re still using one of those prehistoric dot matrix printers from the 1980s, shame on you. It’s time to step into the future with 4D printing.

This Water Battery Will Change the Way We Harness the Sun’s Energy

Researchers design aqueous battery that stores solar energy better than current lithium technology.

Batteries based on water that can store the electricity that we generate from solar technology? It can now be done.

Researchers at Ohio State University have designed a device with an aqueous flow battery that is based on water as opposed to the standard lithium design of your average rechargeable batteries. It is the first aqueous flow battery to work with a solar cell and it is 20 percent more efficient than the lithium design.

Discovery creates future opportunity in quantum computing

Scientists at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) discovered a use for perovskites that runs counter to the intended usage of the hybrid organic-inorganic material.

Considerable research at NREL and elsewhere has been conducted into the use of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites as a solar cell. Perovskite systems have been shown to be highly efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. Experimenting on a lead-halide perovskite, NREL researchers found evidence the material could have great potential for optoelectronic applications beyond photovoltaics, including in the field of quantum computers.

Today, Nature Communications published the research, Large Polarization-Dependent Exciton Optical Stark Effect in Lead Iodide Perovskites. Authors of the paper are Ye Yang, Mengjin Yang, Kai Zhu, Justin Johnson, Joseph Berry, Jao van de Lagemaat, and Matthew Beard.

Aquila’s First Flight

Aquila — facebook’s solar powered internet drone

The internet provides information, opportunity and human connection, yet less than half the world has access. We’re proud to announce the successful first test flight of #Aquila, the solar airplane we designed to bring internet access to people living in remote locations. This innovative plane has the wingspan of an airliner but weighs less than a small car and flies on roughly the power of three blow dryers — incredible!

Source: #facebook

New solar cell is more efficient, costs less than its counterparts

35 percent efficiency.

The cost of solar power is beginning to reach price parity with cheaper fossil fuel-based electricity in many parts of the world, yet the clean energy source still accounts for slightly more than 1% of the world’s electricity mix.

To boost global solar power generation, researchers must overcome some of the technological limitations that are preventing solar power from scaling up even further, which includes the inability to develop very high-efficiency solar cells – solar cells capable of converting a significant amount of sunlight into usable electrical energy – at very low costs.

A team of researchers from the Masdar Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may have found a way around the seemingly inseparable high-efficiency and high-cost linkage through an innovative multi-junction solar cell that leverages a unique “step-cell” design approach and low cost silicon. The new step-cell combines two different layers of sunlight-absorbing material to harvest a broader range of the sun’s energy while using a novel, low-cost manufacturing process.

The team’s step-cell concept can reach theoretical efficiencies above 40% and estimated practical efficiencies of 35%, prompting the team’s principal investigators – Masdar Institute’s Dr. Ammar Nayfeh, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and MIT’s Dr. Eugene Fitzgerald, the Merton C. Flemings — SMA Professor of Materials Science and Engineering – to plan a start-up company to commercialize the promising solar cell.

Cheap and Useful 3D Printed Electronics

Nice.

Shopping trends change from time to time while consumers continue to search for more affordable products with better functionality and specs. Researchers and developers around the world continue to improve company products while lessening the cost of producing these materials.

Gadgets like smartphones, LED lights, tablets and solar cells are already part of the mainstream, and it is not going to change anytime soon. Companies that are involved in this industry must always keep a competitive edge against other manufacturers.

Cheap and Useful 3D Printed Electronics

HKUST Develops Tiny Lasers that Opens New Era for Light-based Computing

Congrats Hong Kong Univ.

Researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have fabricated microscopically-small lasers directly on silicon, enabling the future-generation microprocessors to run faster and less power-hungry – a significant step towards light-based computing.

The innovation, made by Prof Kei-may Lau, Fang Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara; Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University, marks a major breakthrough for the semiconductor industry and well beyond.

Silicon forms the basis of everything from solar cells to the integrated circuits at the heart of our modern electronic gadgets. However, the crystal lattice of silicon and of typical laser materials could not match up, making it impossible to integrate the two materials until now, when Prof Lau’s group managed to integrate subwavelength cavities — the essential building blocks of their tiny lasers — onto silicon, allowing them to create and demonstrate high-density on-chip light-emitting elements. The finding was recently published as the cover story on Applied Physics Letters.

A Robot Army To Build Solar Panels (On The Moon)

As the global headcount nears 8 billion, our thirst for kilowatts is growing by the minute. How will we keep the lights on without overheating the planet in fossil fuel exhaust? Alternative energy is the obvious choice, but scaling up is hard. It would take an area the size of Nevada covered in solar panels to get enough energy to power the planet, says Justin Lewis-Weber, “and to me, that’s just not feasible.” This past March, Lewis-Weber, a then-high school senior in California, came up with a radical plan: self-replicating solar panels—on the moon.

Here’s the gist: When solar panels are orbiting Earth, they enjoy 24 hours of unfiltered sunshine every day, upping their productivity. Once out there, they could convert that solar radiation into electricity (just as existing solar panels do) and then into microwave beams (using the same principle as your kitchen appliance). Those microwaves then get beamed back to Earth, where receivers convert them back into electricity to power the grid. Simple! Except that Lewis-Weber estimates that building and launching thousands of pounds of solar panels and other equipment into space will be outrageously expensive, in the range of hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Instead, he suggested, why not make them on the moon? Land a single robot on the lunar surface, and then program it to mine raw materials, construct solar panels, and (here’s the fun part) make a copy of itself. The process would repeat until an army of self-replicating lunar robot slaves has churned out thousands of solar panels for its power- hungry masters.

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