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An online tool developed by MIT researchers called “Impurities to Efficiency” - or I2E - allows companies or researchers exploring alternative manufacturing strategies to plug in descriptions of their planned materials and processing steps. After about one minute of simulation, I2E gives an indication of exactly how efficient the resulting solar cell would be in converting sunlight to electricity.
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Researchers in the University of Toronto's Department of Materials Science & Engineering have developed what they say are the world’s most efficient organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on plastic. This result enables a flexible form factor as well as a less expensive alternative to traditional OLED manufacturing.
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A research team from the University of Georgia has developed a "super strain" of yeast that can efficiently ferment ethanol from pretreated pine - one of the most common species of trees in the U.S. Their research could help biofuels replace gasoline as a transportation fuel.
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In partnership with the Office of Naval Research, Marines at Camp Smith, Hawaii are testing a trash disposal system called the Micro Auto Gasification System (MAGS) that can reduce a standard 50-gallon bag of waste to a half-pint jar of ash.
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A new mobile lighting system features a fuel cell running on pure hydrogen, resulting in zero-emission electrical power. The fuel cell produces electricity for an advanced, power-saving light-emitting plasma (LEP) lighting system and additional auxiliary power up to 2.5 kW, which allows extra equipment (such as power tools, public address systems, or security metal detectors) to be powered by the unit at the same time the system is providing illumination.
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The 2011 CAFE Green Flight Challenge has a winner! NASA awarded a $1.35-million first place prize to team Pipistrel-USA of State College, PA. The team's electric Taurus G4 aircraft achieved the equivalency of more than 400 miles per gallon. The second place prize of $120,000 went to team eGenius, of Ramona, CA.
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The University of Maryland has won top honors at the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011 by designing, building, and operating the most cost-effective, energy efficient, and attractive solar-powered house. Purdue University took second place followed by New Zealand (Victoria University of Wellington) in third.
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The Lubi^TM, a 145-foot-wide by 12-foot-high wall-mounted solar air heater from Enerconcept Technologies (Magog, Canada), potentially supplies temperatures of 36-45 °F above ambient depending on outdoor temperature and available sunlight. Wind and rain do not affect its performance.
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Researchers from California Institute of Technology have been conducting a field tests at an experimental two-acre wind farm in northern Los Angeles County. The farm, known as the Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy (FLOWE), houses 24 10-meter-tall, 1.2-meter-wide vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) - turbines that have vertical rotors.
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Compact Multi CHIPLEDs developed by OSRAM Opto Semiconductors raise the image quality in FormoLight Technologies' high-performance LED Matrix TVs. Multi CHIPLEDs are the smallest RGB LED currently on the market, and their compact size permits a special image format. The TVs feature a pitch of 2.8mm and high brightness of up to 4500 cd/m².
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New MIT-developed materials make it possible to produce photovoltaic cells on paper or fabric. The technique represents a major departure from the systems used until now to create most solar cells, which require exposing the substrates to potentially damaging conditions, either in the form of liquids or high temperatures.
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Remote villages without access to the power grid must rely on diesel or petroleum generators for electricity, which means they have power only when they can get fuel. Windlift develops portable airborne wind energy (AWE) technology for post-conflict reconstruction, disaster relief, and third-world development.
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Marine Innovation & Technology (MI&T) used digital prototyping software from Autodesk to develop the WindFloat^TM - a small, floating platform capable of supporting large offshore wind turbines - in previously inaccessible locations where water depth exceeds 50m and wind resources are superior.
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TE Connectivity (Harrisburg, PA) offers the UL 1741-Listed pre-wired SOLARLOK combiner box for solar panel installations. The five-string combiner box offers 30-second, error-proof terminations through factory pre-wired TE SOLARLOK connectors, which have polarity keyed housing to help prevent mismating.
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Large wind farms are being built around the world, but operators are still searching for the most cost-effective and efficient way to arrange the massive turbines. To help steer wind farm owners in the right direction, Johns Hopkins University researchers devised a new formula through which the optimal spacing for a large array of turbines can be obtained.
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Keon Jae Lee, a professor in KAIST's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Zhong Lin Wang, a professor in the same department at Georgia Institute of Technology, have developed new forms of highly efficient, flexible nanogenerator technology using freely bendable piezoelectric ceramic thin film nano-materials that can convert tiny movements of the human body (such as heart beats and blood flow) into electrical energy.
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Tyco Electronics (Harrisburg, PA) introduces a solid-state lighting (SSL) solution – the NEVALO SSL system – designed to accelerate lighting manufacturers’ transition from traditional light sources to new LED lighting fixtures. The system combines the many new components and disciplines of SSL systems into one packaged solution.
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National Semiconductor (Santa Clara, CA) has introduced the WEBENCH® LED Architect, which enables designers to perform real-time comparisons and optimize lighting systems for performance, size, and cost.
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A new lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is dedicated to improving the quality of light that light-emitting diodes (LEDs) produce. NIST vision scientists Wendy Davis and Yoshi Ohno and a team of physicists created the NIST Spectrally Tunable Lighting Facility (STLF).
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A team of researchers at MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory have developed Seaswarm, a robot that autonomously navigates the water’s surface and uses nanofibers to absorb 20 times its weight in oil, which could be made into a viable solution for cleaning up the Gulf oil spill.
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Stanford engineers have discovered a process called photon enhanced thermionic emission (PETE) that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity, and could offer over double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology. The process could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil.
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A new solar concentrator from Ph.D. student Jason Karp of the University of California, San Diego collects sunlight with thousands of small lenses imprinted on a common sheet. All these lenses couple into a flat "waveguide" which funnels light to a single photovoltaic cell.
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Berkeley Lab scientists are betting on a recently discovered class of materials - called metal-organic frameworks, which boast a record-shattering internal surface area - to efficiently strip carbon dioxide from a power plant's exhaust before it leaves the smokestack.
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The U.S. Departments of Energy (DOE) and Agriculture (USDA) jointly announced up to $33 million in funding for research and development of technologies and processes to produce biofuels, bioenergy, and high-value biobased products - subject to annual appropriations.
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RTI International developed a polymer nanofiber material with nanoscale properties that provides cost-effective management of visible light in a solid-state lighting device. This video shows prototypes of unique lighting device designs incorporating the technology.
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