America's Sandia National Laboratories provided the big – or should we say tiny – news in solar PV technology last week, with the announcement that its micro solar cells – “glitter-sized” is how Sandia is describing them – could halve the cost of solar panels while nearly doubling their efficiency. The Phoenix Sunreported last Tuesday that engineers at the labs, who have been working on the Microsystems-Enabled Photovoltaics (MEPV) for a while, believe the technology may have reached a tipping point. “As the cells have matured and gotten to the point where we’re getting good, consistent performance, we’re ready to jump into making systems,” said Sandia MEPV team leader, Greg NielsonNielson. “We’ve got these cells; now what are we going to do with them?”
They'll be able to answer this readily enough with the help of a technology transfer award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium, which will allow Sandia to gather a team – including private companies in five states, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), University of South Florida researchers – to produce a new generation of crystalline silicon solar cells that could be as thin as 2-microns. These tiny cells would then be suspended in an ink-like solution and printed onto an ultra-thin and low-cost substrate, the top layer of which would be made up of microlenses to focus the sun’s rays directly onto each solar cell.
Forest for the trees
A team of scientists and technicians has been busy hovering above the Amazon rainforest in Peru these past months conducting an ambitious experiment using pioneering laser technology that they hope could play a key role in preserving the world’s rainforests. Yale e360reports that the technology – conceived by Greg Asner from the Carnegie Institution for Science, and known as AToMS, or the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System – uses a pair of sweeping lasers that, deployed from an aircraft, send 400,000 pulses per second toward the ground. These lasers, along with an imaging spectrometer that detects the chemical and light-reflecting properties of individual plants and trees 7,000 feet below, combine to capture detailed images of individual trees at a rate of 500,000 or more per minute, enabling the creation of high-resolution, three-dimensional physical maps of Amazon cloud forest,s while also mapping their chemical and optical properties.
Testing the technology in Peru, the team of scientists hope to determine not only the tree species that make up the forest below, but also to gauge how the ecosystem is responding to last year’s recording-breaking drought, as well as help develop a better mechanism for monitoring deforestation and degradation, says Yale e360. The technology could also help gain more concrete knowledge about the effect on carbon emissions from deforestation and forest management, information that is critical to the UN's emerging REDD policy. “The whole idea was to measure each of the things plant ecologists measure on the ground to evaluate biodiversity,” Asner tells Yale e360. Asner is now helping the National Science Foundation develop an airplane with these monitoring technologies, and is in talks with NASA about equipping a satellite with the system.
Breath of life
Energy crisis? Global warming? Extreme weather? Glacial melt? It's enough to get one's heart racing. But don't panic, just breathe. Researchers looking to find a renewable, non-invasive power source to keep biological implant devices – like pacemakers – ticking have developed a device that could generate electricity from a patient's breathing. Gizmodoreports that the device, created by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, relies on the piezoelectric effect: where an electrical charge accumulates in response to mechanical stress. But instead of relying on body movements for this, this device uses low-speed airflow, such as that of normal human respiration, to cause the vibration of a plastic microbelt engineered from a piezoelectric material called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF).
"Basically, we are harvesting mechanical energy from biological systems," says materials science and engineering assistant Professor Xudong Wang who created the device along with postdoctoral researcher Chengliang Sun and graduate student Jian Shi. Wang says that, with the airflow of normal human respiration at about two meters per second, the team calculated that if they made the material thin enough, "small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face." Wang believes adjustments will eventually to get the biocompatible material to a submicron level of thinness, that would lead to the development of a practical device that could harvest energy from the airflow in a person's nose, says Gizmodo. Tests so far have seen the device reach power levels in the millivolt range, or up to 6 volts with maximum airflow speeds. Wang and team now plan to work on improving the efficiency of the device. The research appears in the September issue of Energy and Environmental Science.
America's Sandia National Laboratories provided the big – or should we say tiny – news in solar PV technology last week, with the announcement that its micro solar cells – “glitter-sized” is how Sandia is describing them – could halve the cost of solar panels while nearly doubling their efficiency. The Phoenix Sun reported last Tuesday that engineers at the labs, who have been working on the Microsystems-Enabled Photovoltaics (MEPV) for a while, believe the technology may have reached a tipping point. “As the cells have matured and gotten to the point where we’re getting good, consistent performance, we’re ready to jump into making systems,” said Sandia MEPV team leader, Greg NielsonNielson. “We’ve got these cells; now what are we going to do with them?”
They'll be able to answer this readily enough with the help of a technology transfer award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium, which will allow Sandia to gather a team – including private companies in five states, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), University of South Florida researchers – to produce a new generation of crystalline silicon solar cells that could be as thin as 2-microns. These tiny cells would then be suspended in an ink-like solution and printed onto an ultra-thin and low-cost substrate, the top layer of which would be made up of microlenses to focus the sun’s rays directly onto each solar cell.
Forest for the trees
A team of scientists and technicians has been busy hovering above the Amazon rainforest in Peru these past months conducting an ambitious experiment using pioneering laser technology that they hope could play a key role in preserving the world’s rainforests. Yale e360 reports that the technology – conceived by Greg Asner from the Carnegie Institution for Science, and known as AToMS, or the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System – uses a pair of sweeping lasers that, deployed from an aircraft, send 400,000 pulses per second toward the ground. These lasers, along with an imaging spectrometer that detects the chemical and light-reflecting properties of individual plants and trees 7,000 feet below, combine to capture detailed images of individual trees at a rate of 500,000 or more per minute, enabling the creation of high-resolution, three-dimensional physical maps of Amazon cloud forest,s while also mapping their chemical and optical properties.
Testing the technology in Peru, the team of scientists hope to determine not only the tree species that make up the forest below, but also to gauge how the ecosystem is responding to last year’s recording-breaking drought, as well as help develop a better mechanism for monitoring deforestation and degradation, says Yale e360. The technology could also help gain more concrete knowledge about the effect on carbon emissions from deforestation and forest management, information that is critical to the UN's emerging REDD policy. “The whole idea was to measure each of the things plant ecologists measure on the ground to evaluate biodiversity,” Asner tells Yale e360. Asner is now helping the National Science Foundation develop an airplane with these monitoring technologies, and is in talks with NASA about equipping a satellite with the system.
Breath of life
Energy crisis? Global warming? Extreme weather? Glacial melt? It's enough to get one's heart racing. But don't panic, just breathe. Researchers looking to find a renewable, non-invasive power source to keep biological implant devices – like pacemakers – ticking have developed a device that could generate electricity from a patient's breathing. Gizmodo reports that the device, created by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, relies on the piezoelectric effect: where an electrical charge accumulates in response to mechanical stress. But instead of relying on body movements for this, this device uses low-speed airflow, such as that of normal human respiration, to cause the vibration of a plastic microbelt engineered from a piezoelectric material called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF).
"Basically, we are harvesting mechanical energy from biological systems," says materials science and engineering assistant Professor Xudong Wang who created the device along with postdoctoral researcher Chengliang Sun and graduate student Jian Shi. Wang says that, with the airflow of normal human respiration at about two meters per second, the team calculated that if they made the material thin enough, "small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face." Wang believes adjustments will eventually to get the biocompatible material to a submicron level of thinness, that would lead to the development of a practical device that could harvest energy from the airflow in a person's nose, says Gizmodo. Tests so far have seen the device reach power levels in the millivolt range, or up to 6 volts with maximum airflow speeds. Wang and team now plan to work on improving the efficiency of the device. The research appears in the September issue of Energy and Environmental Science.