Nanotech Engineering announced that MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has verified the technology of its new Nanopanel, a solar panel that is declared as 92% efficient (as opposed to around 20% for traditional large panels).
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Currently, desalination provides fresh water for only 1 percent of the world’s population, primarily in the Middle East and Australia. According to the UN, 14% of the world’s population will face water shortages within the next seven years. While this will be a boon to the desalination industry (as well as purveyors of bottled water), it will exact a heavy financial cost on those populations.
The good news is that scientists in the UK have developed a much less expensive method of desalination that could make such equipment accessible and affordable by individuals and communities.
Team Group, memory solutions and accessory provider, has announced the addition of new products to their existing T-FORCE gaming line of products. Among the new products is the T-FORCE CARDEA ZERO M.2 PCI-E solid-state drive, featuring graphene copper foil cooling on the SSD module allowing the SSD to maximize cooling benefits from both natural passive cooling and directed air cooling via fans to deliver excellent heat dissipation.
Graphene and graphene oxide, as well as their functionalized derivatives, may have the capacity to improve performance in devices such as photovoltaics, catalysts, fuel cells, sensors, and batteries. A detailed understanding of these materials on a fundamental level is critical. Raman spectroscopy is a key tool for gaining this understanding of graphene-based materials and their properties.
Direct growth of graphene integrated into electronic devices is highly desirable but difficult due to the nominal ~1000 °C chemical vapor deposition (CVD) temperature, which can seriously deteriorate the substrates. Here we report a great reduction of graphene CVD temperature, down to 50 °C on sapphire and 100 °C on polycarbonate, by using dilute methane as the source and molten gallium (Ga) as catalysts. The very low temperature graphene synthesis is made possible by carbon attachment to the island edges of pre-existing graphene nuclei islands, and causes no damages to the substrates. A key benefit of using molten Ga catalyst is the enhanced methane absorption in Ga at lower temperatures; this leads to a surprisingly low apparent reaction barrier of ~0.16 eV below 300 °C. The faster growth kinetics due to a low reaction barrier and a demonstrated low-temperature graphene nuclei transfer protocol can facilitate practical direct graphene synthesis on many kinds of substrates down to 50–100 °C. Our results represent a significant progress in reducing graphene synthesis temperature and understanding its mechanism.
EPFL scientists have greatly improved the operational stability of perovskite solar cells by introducing cuprous thiocyanate protected by a thin layer of reduced graphene oxide. Devices lost less than 5% performance when subjected to a crucial accelerated aging test during which they were exposed for more than 1000 hours to full sunlight at 60°C.
A group of Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana’s Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering have recently published their study in the Journal of Materials Chemistry which describes a new and sustainable approach to transfer graphene and recycle the copper substrate used in the production of graphene.
Sung Woo’s team utilized carbon dioxide for the process of electrochemical reduction of the interlayer between the substrate layer and the graphene formed by the chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Woo’s team of Researchers also utilized inexpensive food grade ethyl cellulose as a thin film handling layer for the transfer process instead of the polymeric thin films that are used in traditional processes. This inexpensive and environmentally friendly method described here could be an answer for large scale production of graphene.
The use of reverse osmosis desalination technology has gathered more and more usage and interest over the last few years. It is responsible for producing a large amount of fresh water for the growing populations around the world.
Despite their widespread usage, there are still fundamental issues that need to be addressed, and in an effort to expand this technology to more desalination plants worldwide, a team of Researchers from Australia and Egypt have created a new thin film nano-composite (TFNC) membrane to address the issues surrounding water flux, salt rejection and biofouling in these processes.
Secondary ion mass spectrometry, otherwise known as SIMS, is a well-established analytical technique for determining the elemental composition of a sample through ion bombardment and sputtering approaches.
A team of Researchers from Poland have now invented a new SIMS technique- Graphene Enhanced Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (GESIMS), currently patent pending (European patent application no. EP 16461554.4), is an adapted version of traditional SIMS methods which utilizes a graphene layer above the substrate’s surface and analyzes the ejected secondary anions through mass spectrometry.
The unique atom-thick form of carbon known as graphene continues to amaze Researchers studying it, and one of the latest graphene studies found electrons move like slow-pouring honey as they pass through the material.
When passing through metals, electrons move like golf balls on a miniature golf course, occasionally being reflected by imperfections in the metal. However, a new study from University of Manchester Scientists discovered electrons moving through graphene in a slow, flowing manner.