Material could help windows both power your home and control its temperature

05-Jul-2018 - Environmentally friendly building trends have boosted the popularity of window coatings that keep heating and cooling costs down by blocking out unneeded parts of sunlight. They have also inspired scientists and engineers to create thin, see-through solar cells to turn windows into miniature ...

Beating the heat with nanoparticle films

04-Sep-2017 - It is a truth acknowledged throughout much of the world, that a car sitting in the sun on a summer's day must be sweltering. However, a partnership between Sandia National Laboratories and Santa Fe, New Mexico-based IR Dynamics may soon challenge that truth. Together they are turning nano-size ...

A big leap toward tinier lines

29-Mar-2017 - For the last few decades, microchip manufacturers have been on a quest to find ways to make the patterns of wires and components in their microchips ever smaller, in order to fit more of them onto a single chip and thus continue the relentless progress toward faster and more powerful computers. ...

Self-heating lithium-ion battery could beat the winter woes

22-Jan-2016 - A lithium-ion battery that self heats if the temperature is below 32 degrees Fahrenheit has multiple applications, but may have the most impact on relieving winter "range anxiety" for electric vehicle owners, according to a team of researchers from Penn State and EC Power, State College. "It is a ...

Atom by atom, bond by bond, a chemical reaction caught in the act

Berkeley Lab scientists make the first-ever high-resolution images of a molecule as it breaks and reforms chemical bonds

03-Jun-2013 - When Felix Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to develop nanostructures made of graphene using a new, controlled approach to chemical reactions, the first result was a surprise: spectacular images of individual carbon atoms and ...

ORNL scientists help explain graphene mystery

25-Aug-2010 - Nanoscale simulations and theoretical research performed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are bringing scientists closer to realizing graphene's potential in electronic applications. A research team led by ORNL's Bobby Sumpter, Vincent Meunier and Eduardo Cruz-Silva ...

Purple light means go, ultraviolet light means stop

Unique light-controlled membrane acts like a traffic signal for gas

04-Aug-2010 - A new membrane developed at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics blocks gas from flowing through it when one color of light is shined on its surface, and permits gas to flow through when another color of light is used. It is the first time that scientists have developed a ...

Scientists strive to replace silicon with graphene on nanocircuitry

15-Jun-2010 - Scientists have made a breakthrough toward creating nanocircuitry on graphene, widely regarded as the most promising candidate to replace silicon as the building block of transistors. They have devised a simple and quick one-step process based on thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL) for creating ...

Nanotech yields major advance in heat transfer, cooling technologies

11-Jun-2010 - Researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered a new way to apply nanostructure coatings to make heat transfer far more efficient, with important potential applications to high tech devices as well as the conventional heating and cooling ...

Seeing moire in graphene

03-May-2010 - Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated that atomic scale moiré patterns, an interference pattern that appears when two or more grids are overlaid slightly askew, can be used to measure how sheets of ...