adminA team led by researchers has created a super-strong yet light structural metal with extremely high specific strength and modulus, or stiffness-to-weight ratio. To create the super-strong but lightweight metal, the team found a new way to disperse and stabilize nanoparticles in molten metals.
Are you sick of your phone’s battery dying after only a few hours? Researchers are hard at work on improving something called the solid electrolyte interphase as a way to boost battery life.
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Understanding and manipulating plasmons is important for their potential use in photovoltaics, solar cell water splitting, and sunlight-induced fuel production from carbon dioxide. Researchers have used a real-time numerical algorithm to study both the plasmon and hot carrier within the same framework. That is critical for understanding how long a particle stays excited, and whether there is energy backflow from hot carrier to plasmon.
The United States has fallen behind on offshore wind power, experts say. Their findings show that while offshore wind turbines have been successfully deployed in Europe since 1991, the U.S. is further from commercial-scale offshore wind deployment today than it was in 2005.
Researchers have revealed the structure of the buffer layer in a CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selenide) solar cell at SPring8, the world’s largest third-generation synchrotron radiation facility. They found that the buffer layer was composed of two layers: an upper Zn(OH)2 layer and a lower Zn(S, O) layer. By removing the upper Zn(OH)2 layer, the solar conversion efficiency was doubled.
adminAn inexpensive method for generating clean fuel is the modern-day equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. One compelling idea is to use solar energy to split water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen and then harvest the hydrogen for use as fuel. But splitting water efficiently turns out to be not so easy.
