Researchers harvest abundant clean energy from thin air, 24/7

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity”

29-May-2023 - A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in ...

Smart gifts will soon unwrap themselves

Cellulose-based actuators can be programmed and repair themselves

29-Nov-2022 - With the help of the high-brilliance X-ray source PETRA III, a German-Swedish research group has developed a new cellulose polymer material that can be specifically animated to move by moisture, making it an ideal base material for programmable actuators. In addition, the composite material is ...

Lone water molecules turn out to be directors of supramolecular chemistry

01-Jun-2018 - Scientists in supramolecular chemistry often run into surprising outcomes. A broken seal of a lab cuvette led an American researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology to the origin of these inexplicable results: the weather. Or the humidity, to be more precise, because this determines the ...

Smart tomographic sensors control industrial processes of tomorrow

HZDR coordinates European Doctoral Training Network TOMOCON

01-Sep-2017 - Modern parallel computer architectures are capable of processing huge amounts of data at high speed. This allows for the increasing use of imaging techniques as sensors to control machines and process plants. In the new European collaborative project TOMOCON twelve research institutions and 15 ...

The unexpected hardness of gallium nitride

31-Oct-2016 - Gallium nitride (GaN) has emerged as one of the most important and widely used semiconducting materials. Its optoelectronic and mechanical properties make it ideal for a variety of applications, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), high-temperature transistors, sensors and biocompatible ...

Thermal modification of wood and a complex study of its properties by magnetic resonance

27-May-2016 - Heat treatment has proved to be an effective method of improving some of the useful properties of wood. Recent developments of the technology have allowed to achieve, among other things, increased hydrophobic properties, better elasticity, and improved dimensional stability. The corresponding ...

Lawrence Livermore National Lab to explore spectral imaging to detect moisture in solar cells

18-Sep-2015 - A Lawrence Livermore National Lab engineer has been awarded $570,000 through the Department of Energy SunShot Initiative to explore spectroscopic technology as a means of detecting moisture buildup in solar photovoltaic cells. Over the next two years, Mihail Bora, a Materials Engineering Division ...

Renewable energy from evaporating water

New clean energy source produces electricity, could power robots, sensors and vehicles

18-Jun-2015 - An immensely powerful yet invisible force pulls water from the earth to the top of the tallest redwood and delivers snow to the tops of the Himalayas. Yet despite the power of evaporating water, its potential to propel self-sufficient devices or produce electricity has remained largely untapped - ...

Solid or liquid - the particle size matters

Max Planck researchers elucidate how the phase state of aerosol nanoparticles depends on their size

28-Jan-2015 - Whether tiny particles in the air, so-called aerosol nanoparticles, are solid or liquid, is of great importance to atmospheric and climate scientists. The phase state determines if and how fast such particles grow into cloud condensation nuclei on which water vapor can condense to form cloud ...

Human skin grown in lab can replace animal testing

28-Apr-2014 - An international team led by King's College London and the San Francisco Veteran Affairs Medical Center (SFVAMC) has developed the first lab-grown epidermis – the outermost skin layer - with a functional permeability barrier akin to real skin. The new epidermis, grown from human pluripotent stem ...