A Detroit entrepreneur surprised university engineers when he invented flash processing – a heat-treatment process which lasts only 10 seconds and it makes steel stronger and more shock-absorbing than the most common titanium alloys used by industry. Now the entrepreneur is working with researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) to better understand the science behind… »
A group of researchers from University of Illinois developed a three-dimensional nanostructure for battery cathodes that allows dramatically faster charging and discharging without sacrificing energy storage capacity. Aside from quick-charge consumer electronics, batteries that can store a lot of energy, release it fast and recharge quickly are desirable for electric vehicles, medical devices, lasers and… »
A multidisciplinary team of Stanford engineers led by Mike McGehee, Yi Cui and Mark Brongersma, and joined by Michael Graetzel at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), is developing a new type of thin solar cell that could offer a new direction for the field. They succeeded in harnessing plasmonics – trapping light within… »
Researchers explored the thermo-chemical approach to capture solar energy since the 1970s, but nobody could find a chemical that could reliably and reversibly switch between two states, absorbing sunlight to go into one state and then releasing heat when it reverted to the first state. Such a compound was discovered in 1996, but it included… »
Stanford engineers have found out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil. Unlike photovoltaic technology currently used in solar panels (which become less… »
Although we already wrote about lotus biomimicry for water-repelling surfaces, in this article we’re going to write about a surface with similar properties. Engineering researchers have created what they say is a “nearly perfect hydrophobic interface” by mimicking spiders. By using plastic to reproduce the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on… »
Tiny snails sitting on the ocean floor might seem defenseless against a large, determined predator such as a crab. But evolution has provided one species of sea snail with a unique iron-plated armored shell that resists such attacks. The snail has evolved a tri-layered shell structure consisting of an outer layer embedded with iron sulfide… »
Stanford scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to quickly produce ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and supercapacitors in the form of everyday paper. The research team led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, includes postdoctoral scholars Liangbing Hu and JangWook Choi, and graduate student Yuan Yang. Simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made… »
