Industry News

June 2020
Virgin Galactic Second Glide Test at Spaceport America
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity, has completed its second glide flight held at the Spaceport America facility in Southern New Mexico. New Mexico Spaceport Authority’s Director of Aerospace Operations, Dr. Bill Gutman, said “Virgin Galactic continues to work steadily towards their goa
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Date:
06/26/2020
Richardson Electronics, DAPU Telecom Distribution Agreement
Richardson Electronics, Ltd. announced a new distribution agreement with DAPU Telecom. The agreement aligns with both companies’ commitment to providing the highest reliability and quality products into various applications including RF and microwave communications, industrial, wired and wireless transmission, ra
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Date:
06/23/2020
Catalyzing a Green Future

In the MOF scaffold, the organic linker (grey) acts as photon antenna; an electron from the linker is transferred to the metal chain (pink) and used for the production of H2 from water.

A metal organic framework (MOF)-based water splitting photocatalyst, developed at KAUST, has brought researchers a step closer to generating clean hydrogen fuel using sunlight. "Using solar energy to efficiently make green fuels is the ultimate goal for many catalysis researchers," says Jorge Gas
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Date:
06/23/2020
Increased Power from Solar Panels Thanks to Cleaner Air
During the COVID-19 pandemic, one unexpected outcome in cities around the world has been a reduction in air pollution, as people stay home to avoid contracting the coronavirus. Based on data collected in Delhi, India, researchers report that this cleaner air has led to more sunlight reaching solar panels, resulting in
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Date:
06/23/2020
Future Space Travelers may Follow Cosmic Lighthouses

An image of NICER on the exterior of the space station with one of the station's solar panels in the background.

For centuries, lighthouses helped sailors navigate safely into harbor. Their lights swept across the water, cutting through fog and darkness, guiding mariners around dangerous obstacles and keeping them on the right path. In the future, space explorers may receive similar guidance from the steady signals created by
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Date:
06/22/2020
Wind Turbines Help Defend National Grid from Power Cuts
A ‘smart’ system that controls the storage and release of energy from wind turbines will reduce the risk of power cuts and support the increase of wind energy use world-wide, say researchers at the University of Birmingham.   The system uses the variable speed of the rotors in wind turbine systems to more closely regula
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Date:
06/19/2020
Vicinity Energy Acquires Central Energy Plant
Vicinity Energy announced that it has acquired the district energy system serving the historic Watergate Complex in Washington D.C. and taken over operations as of February 1st 2020.  The acquisition is the first for the company under its new ownership, making Washington D.C. the eleventh major city se
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Date:
06/17/2020
Stabilizing Efforts to Bring Fusion Power to Earth

Physicist Florian Laggner before the DIII-D tokamak with a figure from his paper.

All efforts to replicate in tokamak fusion facilities the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars must cope with a constant problem -- transient heat bursts that can halt fusion reactions and damage the doughnut-shaped tokamaks. These bursts, called edge localized modes (ELMs), occur at the edge of hot, ch
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Date:
06/17/2020
Energy Storage Using Oxygen to Boost Battery Performance

Schematic of the formation process of EG-water complexes and illustration of the penetration process of an isolated water molecule.

Researchers have presented a novel electrode material for advanced energy storage device that is directly charged with oxygen from the air. Professor Jeung Ku Kang's team synthesized and preserved the sub-nanometric particles of atomic cluster sizes at high mass loadings within metal-organic frameworks (MOF) by
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Date:
06/17/2020
A Phase Battery for Quantum Technologies

The first quantum phase battery, consisting of an indium arsenide (InAs) nanowire in contact with aluminum superconducting leads.

Batteries belongs to everyday life. A classical battery, the Volta´s pile, converts chemical energy into a voltage, which can power electronic circuits. In many quantum technologies, circuits or devices are based on superconducting materials. In such materials, currents may flow without the need of an applied vo
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Date:
06/15/2020
$20 Million Grant for Data Analytics Collaboration, Network
A $20 million grant to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission's Division of Science and Technology, in partnership with the University of Arkansas and eight other colleges and universities, will build a high-performance computing network for data analytics and bring together scientists and engineers from acr
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Date:
06/15/2020
Discovery of Graphene Switch
Researchers at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) have successfully measured the current-voltage curve of graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) that were suspended between two electrodes. Measurements were performed using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observation. Results revealed that, in
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Date:
06/15/2020
Studying the Intrinsic Properties of Solid-State Materials

Micro-scale device manufactured of polycrystalline TaGeIr: (a) scanning electron microscopy of synthesized specimen with single-phase regions of TaGeIr (orange rectangles), (b) micro-scale device for resistivity measurement, and (c) resistivity data, revealing semiconducting nature of TaGeIr.

The physical and chemical properties of intermetallic compounds are governed by the real structure of synthesized materials and are strongly influenced by the structural imperfections, e.g. strain, dislocations, and presence of admixture phases. This leads to inconsistent reports for known and extensively studied ma
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Date:
06/10/2020
Machine Learning Predicts Nanoparticles' Structure, Dynamics

Nanostructures such as these thiol-covered gold nanoparticles can now be studied by using the new machine learning method developed in the University of Jyväskylä. The method can predict the potential energy of a given structure reliably.

Researchers at the Nanoscience Center and at the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have demonstrated that new distance-based machine learning methods, developed in the University of Jyväskylä, are capable of predicting structures and atomic dynamics of nanoparticles re
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Date:
06/10/2020
Renewable Fuel from Carbon Dioxide with Aid of Solar Energy

Researchers at Linköping University work with the growth reactor in which cubic silicon carbide is made.

Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, are attempting to convert carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to fuel using energy from sunlight. Recent results have shown that it is possible to use their technique to selectively produce methane, carbon monoxide or formic acid from carbon dioxide and water. The st
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Date:
06/10/2020
Porous Materials for the 'Energy Revolution'
Sustainable energy supply and storage is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century, which the group of Stefan Kaskel, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at TU Dresden, also aims to tackle. For many years, they have been successfully researching nanostructured and porous carbon materials for the use in
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Date:
06/10/2020
Los Lunas, New Mexico Unveils Cutting Edge Solar Technology
The Village of Los Lunas turned on its brand new Poly-gen Vertical Solar System that will provide power to the Village’s Recycling Center 24/7. The system utilizes a brand-new technology, and the Village of Los Lunas is the first municipality in the nation to have it. The system was designed and installed by
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Date:
06/08/2020
Discovery Unlocks ‘hot’ Electrons for Efficient Energy use

Researchers developed a technique that uses a scanning tunneling microscope integrated with lasers and other optical components to trap appropriate molecules and measure the energy distribution of hot electrons in a thin gold film. (Illustration by Enrique Sahagún)

Highly energetic, “hot” electrons have the potential to help solar panels more efficiently harvest light energy. But scientists haven’t been able to measure the energies of those electrons, limiting their use. Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Michigan built a way to analyze those ene
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Date:
06/04/2020
Scout Clean Energy Completes 180 MW Heart of Texas Wind Farm
Scout Clean Energy ("Scout") has completed construction and successfully closed tax equity funding for the 180 MW Heart of Texas Wind Farm ("HTX") located in McCulloch County, Texas. "Heart of Texas was completed on time and under budget which is quite an achievement given the wide-
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Date:
06/02/2020
Bluetooth SIG and DiiA Accelerate IoT Commercial Lighting
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the trade association that oversees Bluetooth technology, and the DiiA, the global DALI alliance of companies from the lighting and sensor industries, announced a collaboration designed to accelerate the adoption of IoT-enabled commercial lighting systems. The colla
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Date:
06/02/2020
Monolithic Power Expands eCommerce Footprint w/ Farnell
Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. announced that the company is entering into a distribution agreement with Farnell Electronics, a global, online distributor specializing in high-service distribution of technology products, services, and solutions for electronic systems design. This partnership will give customers ac
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Date:
06/02/2020
A Storage Battery for the Entire World
The lithium-ion batteries currently available for e-mobility are being optimized primarily to increase power density. However, the requirements are different for batteries for stationary energy storage in rural, decentralized electrification. They should be inexpensive, consist of readily available materials, be
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Date:
06/02/2020
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