Solar panel windows could revolutionize urban architecture by turning buildings into energy producing structures. Read about how scientists are trying to enable solar windows by exploring new chemistry.
Breaking the all-perovskite tandem solar cell efficiency ceiling
Boosting the performance of new solar panel technologies is a goal researchers around the world seek to enable clean energy. Read how a team of 25 researchers achieve this with new materials!
Crystal Engineering for Better Solar Panels
Solar panels are made up of highly processed expensive materials. Find out how researchers explore alternative solar materials by engineering new crystal structures.
Plasmonic Stamps: Simple Color Control
Optical electronics are the future of technology. Take a look at how a new printing technique may enable chip scale manipulation of light via gold nanoparticles.
“Plenty of Room at the Bottom” for Quantum Dots
Control at the atomic scale is being realized by researchers across the world through synthesis of quantum dot materials. Take a look at an overview of what makes these tiny particles so special.
Metal Nanowires made Possible
Nanowires are part of the future of smaller, smarter electronics. Here’s a interesting new method of making metal nanowires.
GRID SCALE ENERGY STORAGE: A NEW MANGANESE-HYDROGEN BATTERY
For solar and wind to be viable technologies, large scale and cost effective batteries are sorely needed. Now, researchers have made a totally new type of battery, based on cheap manganese sulfate, that fits this bill. Their large proof-of-concept proptoype battery reached ~97% and powered a blue LED for hours!
Double Perovskite Nanocrystals: New Synthesis and Structures for Solar Energy
Lead based perovskite is an exciting new material for solar energy, but it’s based on lead. These researchers found a way around that, making new double perovskite materials based on silver and bismuth. This new synthesis has exciting future in making perovskite solar panels into a environmentally friendly technology.
Energy Flow in Quantum Dot – Organic semiconductors
Quantum dots are fascinating super small solids. Highly conjugated tetracene is an electronically active organic molecule. When these two are mixed, electrons bounce around in amazing ways and these researchers found out how.
Designing and Understanding New Semiconductor Crystals
Solar panels are expensive because of the high-purity silicon present in them. A new material called perovskite rivals the solar conversion efficiency of silicon, but at a fraction of the cost. There is however still a lot of fundamental understanding to be done on perovskites, which these researchers do by studying analogous structures.
Machine Learning for Understanding Materials Synthesis
Title: Materials Synthesis Insights from Scientific Literature via Text Extraction and Machine Learning Authors: Edward Kim, Kevin Huang, Adam Saunders, Andrew McCallum, Gerbrand Ceder, and Elsa Olivetti Year: 2017 Journal: Chemistry of Materials The sheer volume of publications makes scientific literature a vast sea of information…
Cheap and Efficient Solar Energy: Flexible Quantum Dot Solar Cells
Solar energy is often touted as too expensive for large-scale energy production. This work gives insight into making one component of next gen solar cells, the metal oxide layer, significantly easier to fabricate.