Persian Penguin Network

Researchers over at the National Renewable Energy Lab have reportedly made the first solar cell with an external quantum efficiency over 100 percent. Quantum efficiency relates to the number of electrons-per-second flowing in a solar cell circuit, divided by the number of photons from the energy entering. The NREL team recorded an efficiency topping out at 114 percent, by creating the first working multiple exciton generation (MEG) cell. Using MEG, a single high energy photon can produce more than one electron-hole pair per absorbed photon. The extra efficiency comes from quantum dots ‘harvesting’ energy that would otherwise be lost as heat. The cell itself uses anti-reflection coating on a transparent conductor, layered with zinc oxide, lead selenide, and gold. NREL scientist Arthur J. Nozik predicted as far back as 2001 that MEG would do the job, but it’s taken until now for the concept to leap over from theory. The hope is, of course, that this will lead to more competitively priced solar power, fueling the transport of the future.So in the future who owns the most desert wins the power race.. oh wait. isn’t that the middle easterners again. ;D

By Engadget

Gordon Murray, designer of the truly insane McLaren F1, swept the board at the RAC Future Car Challenge this Saturday — but for something much more sensible. It’s the 1,500lbs T.27 EV, the little wonder in the picture above, which just carried two people the 57.13 miles from Brighton to London on just 64p ($1.20) of electricity. Compared to a petrol car that would be the equivalent of getting 350MPG. It’s believed the T.27 can easily make 100 miles on a single four-hour charge and scooped eleven awards on the day, including most efficient and best EV. Murray is still waiting on a manufacturer to sign on to produce the things, but thanks to his super efficient iStream process, they could pop up for sale soon after — which can only be good news for anyone who wants a commuting vehicle with something of a racing pedigree.

Here is the specs :

By Engadget ,Gordon Murray

So, this is pretty… big. At this very moment, researchers at IBM are building the largest data drive ever — a 120 petabyte beast comprised of some 200,000 normal HDDs working in concert. To put that into perspective, 120 petabytes is the equivalent of 120 million gigabytes, (or enough space to hold about 24 billion, average-sized MP3’s), and significantly more spacious than the 15 petabyte capacity found in the biggest arrays currently in use. To achieve this, IBM aligned individual drives in horizontal drawers, as in most data centers, but made these spaces even wider, in order to accommodate more disks within smaller confines. Engineers also implemented a new data backup mechanism, whereby information from dying disks is slowly reproduced on a replacement drive, allowing the system to continue running without any slowdown. A system called GPFS, meanwhile, spreads stored files over multiple disks, allowing the machine to read or write different parts of a given file at once, while indexing its entire collection at breakneck speeds. The company developed this particular system for an unnamed client looking to conduct complex simulations, but Bruce Hillsberg, IBM’s director of storage research, says it may be only a matter of time before all cloud computing systems sport similar architectures. For the moment, however, he admits that his creation is still “on the lunatic fringe.”

By Engadget

NanoPhotonica, a developer of advanced materials, has perfected realizable, breakthrough QLED display technology that it is commercializing for mass production.
NanoPhotonica promise with the new S-QLED technology better picture quality than OLED-Displays, use 30 per cent less power, the price up to 75 per cent lower
The technology’s versatility across all display sizes is made possible through cost-effective ink jet printing that requires no vacuum deposition. A few days ago Samsung showcased the first full colour QLED Display.

Improvements have been made in image quality with the newer OLED technology, but high manufacturing costs, yield limitations and limited lifetime make it expensive and challenging for all but the smallest devices.
The company’s S-QLED technology improves on the picture quality and power consumption achieved by recently introduced OLED displays, while significantly reducing cost and improving lifetime well beyond what OLED can achieve. NanoPhotonica’s materials and design solution is cost-effective on the full range of displays from smartphones to large devices like TVs.

NanoPhotonica is currently working with several leading display manufacturers to commercialize devices based on its proprietary technology. Work at independent laboratories previously identified key performance advantages.

“Most current electronic products have LCD displays that are power hogs and provide picture quality that, as we all know, leaves a lot to be desired,” explains CEO Dr. Christopher Morton. “Improvements have been made in image quality with the newer OLED technology, but high manufacturing costs, yield limitations and limited lifetime make it expensive and challenging for all but the smallest devices.”

“NanoPhotonica has a game-changing approach to the materials, design and manufacture for displays,” adds Morton. “We’re excited by the benefits we bring to the industry and by the response we have had from major display producers worldwide. Our focus is to accelerate work with existing and new display partners to bring this QLED technology to market soon. Our materials are enabling similar advances in the solar industry, and we intend to announce more about those programs shortly.”

By OLED Display Network

A NEW way of providing crystal clear vision through an opaque layer could one day lead to a non-invasive technique for targeting cancer cells.

Some opaque materials will allow small amounts of light through if they are in a thin enough layer. But as light passes through the layer it is scattered in both time and space, so an image projected on one side emerges blurry and unfocused on the other.

Now Jochen Aulbach at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues, have found a way to sharpen things up. They figured that it should be possible to manipulate light so that the scattering it experiences as it passes through the layer leaves it focused.

The team achieved this through a trial and error process. They used a liquid crystal device which allows precise control of light, called a spatial light modulator (SLM), to manipulate 64-femtosecond-long laser pulses being projected onto a layer of paint. A detector measured the intensity and duration of the pulses that emerged from the other side. This information was then passed to a computer program that used it to tweak the SLM to make the next pulse arriving at the detector both brighter and less spread out in time.

In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, the team reports that it took about 10 minutes of repetition for the system to refine the tweaks sufficiently to create a coherent, bright pulse that was still just 115 femtoseconds long despite its tortuous route through the paint. By modifying the light pulse to travel through skin instead of paint it might be possible to deliver short, intense laser pulses to destroy cancer cells but leave nearby healthy cells intact.

Sylvain Gigan of the Langevin Institute in Paris, France, calls the time resolution impressive. “It is both very elegant and very effective,” he says.

By New Scientist

Researchers from the US DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Princeton University found a way to combine Graphene and indium tin oxide (ITO) nanoparticles to create cheaper and more durable fuel cells.

Fuel cells work by chemically breaking down oxygen and hydrogen gases to create an electrical current, producing water and heat in the process. The centerpiece of the fuel cell is the chemical catalyst — usually a metal such as platinum — sitting on a support that is often made of black carbon. A good supporting material spreads the platinum evenly over its surface to maximize the surface area with which it can attack gas molecules and is also electrically conductive.

The problem with using black carbon as support is that the platinum atoms tend to clump on such carbon, and water can degrade the carbon away. A different design uses metal oxides which are more stable and have better catalyst dispersion – but they have low conductivity and aren’t easy to synthesize. The new design uses the best of both worlds…

The team is now incorporating the platinum-ITO-graphene material into experimental fuel cells to determine how well it works under real world conditions and how long it lasts.

via PNNL

By Graphene Info !