Industry News

July 2020
ETRI Develops Eco-Friendly Color Thin-Film Solar Cells

The eco-friendly color CIGS thin film solar cells developed by ETRI researchers.

Research on solar cells to secure renewable energy sources are ongoing around the world. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in South Korea succeeded in developing eco-friendly color Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) thin-film solar cells. CIGS thin-film solar cells are used to convert sunlight
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Date:
07/31/2020
Quantum Machines Learn
Skoltech scientists have shown that quantum enhanced machine learning can be used on quantum (as opposed to classical) data, overcoming a significant slowdown common to these applications and opening a "fertile ground to develop computational insights into quantum systems". The paper was published in
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Date:
07/31/2020
Multi-Group Team Awarded $60M for Solar Fuels Research

Scientists at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis create new materials by spraying combinations of elements onto thin plates.

The quest for renewable fuels harvested from the sun continues, as the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced two new major awards focused on advancing artificial photosynthesis technologies for the production of fuels from sunlight. As part of this effort, DOE has awarded $60 million to a new solar fuels in
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Date:
07/31/2020
IR HiRel Marks Milestone with NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is planning to send the Rover Perseverance on a journey to Mars. The launch is scheduled for 7:50 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, with the landing on the Red Planet targeted for February 2021. IR HiRel, an Infineon Technologies AG company, supplied thousands of mission-critical ra
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Date:
07/29/2020
EnergyMark Announces Approval for PJM Electric Grid Service
EnergyMark has announced their approval for service in the PJM Electric Grid, which serves 65 million energy users and is the nation's largest regional power transmission system. PJM is a regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of 13 stat
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Date:
07/28/2020
C2 Energy Capital Works to Guide School Solar Project
C2 Energy Capital LLC announced the completion of a one-megawatt solar power project for the Otsego Local School District located near Bowling Green, Ohio. The company financed, owns, and operates the project. The first clean energy project of its kind with the local Tontogany utility, C2 Energy Capital supported re
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Date:
07/28/2020
The Solar Cell you can Print

PhD student Nasim Zarrabi from the Sustainable Advanced Materials Programme (Sêr?SAM) at Swansea University using the sealed "glovebox" which ensures ultra-clean conditions for the high-tech manufacturing process for next-generation solar modules.

A £6 million award will drive next-generation solar technology into new applications. The grant brings together three world-renowned research groups from Swansea University, Imperial College London and Oxford University to advance organic and perovskite solar cells into applications that current solar tec
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Date:
07/27/2020
DOE Unveils Blueprint for Quantum Internet

Nationwide effort to build quantum networks and usher in new era of communications.

In a press conference at the University of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) unveiled a report that lays out a blueprint strategy for the development of a national quantum internet, bringing the United States to the forefront of the global quantum race and ushering in a new era of communica
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Date:
07/24/2020
New Technology Makes Homes More Energy Independent

Mixed neighborhood used in the researchers' computer simulation. Open circles denote nodes where homes have PINE systems and dark, filled circles are nodes where homes do not have PINE. All homes receive energy from the grid.

In a new study, researchers from Texas A&M University and industry have designed a smart technology that can help utility companies better serve communities affected by blackouts. The researchers said their single device works by improving energy delivery between home solar-power systems and the electrical gr
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Date:
07/24/2020
New Material Generates Hydrogen from Salt and Polluted Water
Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with teams from the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague and Jan Evangelista Purkyn University in Ústí nad Labem have developed a new 2D material to produce hydrogen, which is the basis of alternative energy. The material efficiently generates hydrogen mo
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Date:
07/22/2020
Lithium Ion Battery Waste Used in Biodiesel Production

The two-phase system containing biodiesel (upper phase) and glycerol (lower phase)

The production of biodiesel from vegetable oil has been around for more than 150 years, and the approach significantly reduces several pollutants associated with burning fossil fuels. Vegetable oils, however, can be notoriously difficult to use in an engine, providing low power output and release of unique toxic by
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Date:
07/22/2020
Diamonds Shine a Light on Hidden Currents in Graphene

A picture of an electrical current in graphene (marked by the red outline) showing a fluid-like flow imaged using a diamond-based quantum sensor. The grey portion is where the metal electrical contacts prevented collection of data.

It sounds like pure sorcery: using diamonds to observe invisible power swirling and flowing through carefully crafted channels. But these diamonds are a reality. JQI Fellow Ronald Walsworth and Quantum Technology Center (QTC) Postdoctoral Associate Mark Ku, along with colleagues from several other institutions, in
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Date:
07/22/2020
New EU Project to Boost Battery Development

Systematic automation as well as the use of AI in the planning and evaluation of test series will accelerate the development of new batteries.

The BIG-MAP project, which is funded by the European Union (EU), aims to significantly shorten the time it takes to develop new types of batteries - with a special focus on sustainability. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Ulm University are participating in the project via the CELEST research pl
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Date:
07/21/2020
Which Way to the Fridge? Common Sense Helps Robots Navigate
A robot travelling from point A to point B is more efficient if it understands that point A is the living room couch and point B is a refrigerator, even if it's in an unfamiliar place. That's the common sense idea behind a "semantic" navigation system developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook AI R
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Date:
07/20/2020
Metal Catalysts to Optimize Zinc-Air Batteries
In a report published in NANO, a team of researchers from Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, China have developed N-doped carbon encapsulated transition metal catalysts for oxygen reduction reactions (ORR) and oxygen evolution reactions (OER) to optimize performance of zinc-air batteries. Three-dimensional porous gr
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Date:
07/19/2020
Learning Algorithm Should Expand Possible AI Applications

TU Graz computer scientists Robert Legenstein and Wolfgang Maass (from left) are working on energy-efficient AI systems and are inspired by the functioning of the human brain.

The high energy consumption of artificial neural networks' learning activities is one of the biggest hurdles for the broad use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in mobile applications. One approach to solving this problem can be gleaned from knowledge about the human brain. Although it has the computing pow
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Date:
07/19/2020
Lignin-Bio-Aviation Fuels for Reducing Greenhouse Gas

The team, led by Dr. Jeong-Myeong Ha of the Clean Energy Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology(KIST), has developed a technology that can be used to mass-produce aviation-grade fuels from wood wastes. The ability to produce aviation-grade fuel from wood waste is expected to help international aviation companies comply with the new strong emissions regulations, which are scheduled to go into effect in 2027.

A Korean research team has developed a key technology for the mass-production of bio-aviation fuels. The team, led by Dr. Jeong-Myeong Ha of the Clean Energy Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), has announced its successful development of a technology that can be used to mass-
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Date:
07/17/2020
Solar FlexRack Supplies Trackers for Primergy Solar Projects
Solar FlexRack announced that the company has supplied Primergy Solar with its TDP and TDP 2.0 Solar Trackers for 14 projects, all of which will supply energy to schools in Illinois. Located in the north and central sections of Illinois, the projects together total over 8 megawatts (MW). "Primergy Solar has
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Date:
07/15/2020
Perovskite Solar Cells Record Highest Power Conversion

Perovskites can be used to create light-weight flexible and semi-transparent solar cells ideal for applications in buildings and a variety of urban spaces.

A team of researchers at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has created a perovskite solar mini module that has recorded the highest power conversion efficiency of any perovskite-based device larger than 10 cm2. Perovskites are new materials that have emerged as promising alternati
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Date:
07/14/2020
New Materials for Extra Thin Computer Chips

Currently, only a small selection of insulators for extremely small transistors exists: SiO2 (right) is amorphous and has an undefined surface, hBN (middle) is crystalline but it is not a good insulator, CaF2 (left) is crystalline, has a clean surface, and is a very good insulator.

Ever smaller and ever more compact - this is the direction in which computer chips are developing, driven by industry. This is why so-called 2D materials are considered to be the great hope: they are as thin as a material can possibly be, in extreme cases they consist of only one single layer of atoms. This ma
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Date:
07/13/2020
The Love-Hate Relationship of Halide Perovskites w/ the Sun

The atomic structure of mixed FACsPbI3 perovskite, where it separates into two CsPbI3 (green region) and FAPbI3 clusters under light excitation.

Solar cells made of perovskite are at the center of much recent solar research. The material is cheap, easy to produce and almost as efficient as silicon, the material traditionally used in solar cells. However, perovskite cells have a love-hate-relationship with the sun. The light that they need to generate el
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Date:
07/10/2020
CleanSpark, Inc., ReJoule Awarded $2.9 Million Battery Grant
CleanSpark, Inc. and ReJoule announced that they have been awarded a grant from the California Energy Commission. The grant is approximately $2.9 million and is slated to be deployed over the next 30 months. The funds will be distributed to the multi-group partnership of clean energy and technology companies
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Date:
07/09/2020
Battery Project Makes Room for More Rooftop Solar in Decorah
Clean, solar energy is a good thing. But it can also affect the performance and efficiency of the electric grid. An innovative battery-storage solution in Decorah, Iowa, jointly supported by Alliant Energy, US Department of Energy (DOE), and the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA), looks to seamlessly co
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Date:
07/08/2020
Lasers Powerful Enough to Investigate a new Kind of Physics

The paper "Thin plate compression of a sub-petawatt Ti:Sa laser pulses" made the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Volume 116, Issue 24 published June 15, 2020.

In a paper that made the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, an international team of researchers has demonstrated an innovative technique for increasing the intensity of lasers. This approach, based on the compression of light pulses, would make it possible to reach a threshold intensity for a new t
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Date:
07/06/2020
'Breath of Nothing' for a new Superconductivity Perspective
Zero electrical resistance at room temperature? A material with this property, i.e. a room temperature superconductor, could revolutionize power distribution. But so far, the origin of superconductivity at high temperature is only incompletely understood. Scientists from Universität Hamburg and the Cluster of
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Date:
07/06/2020
Atomic 'Swiss Army Knife' Measures Quantum Materials

Top: Photo of a sample inside the scanning probe module showing the eight electrical contacts to a plate containing the sample to be studied. In the center the probe tip and its reflection in the sample can be seen. Bottom: Atomic force image of an aluminum sample showing the arrangement of atoms measured at 0.01 Kelvin (-459.65 degree Fahrenheit). The red curve shows the aluminum film is superconducting by having an electrical current with zero voltage.

It images single atoms. It maps atomic-scale hills and valleys on metal and insulating surfaces. And it records the flow of current across atom-thin materials subject to giant magnetic fields. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel instrument that can make th
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Date:
07/06/2020
Faster Data Processing Through Ultrashort Electric Pulses
Physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Lanzhou University in China developed a simple concept that could improve significantly magnetic-based data processing. Using ultrashort electric pulses in the terahertz range, data can be written, read and erased very quickly. This would make da
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Date:
07/03/2020
Decoding Material Wear with Supercomputers
Wear and friction are crucial issues in many industrial sectors: What happens when one surface slides across another? Which changes must be expected in the material? What does this mean for the durability and safety of machines? What happens at the atomic level cannot be observed directly. However, an additi
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Date:
07/01/2020
Mathematical Noodling for Insights into old Fusion Problem

PPPL physicist Christopher Smiet helped produce findings that could bring fusion-produced electricity closer to being a reality.

A challenge to creating fusion energy on Earth is trapping the charged gas known as plasma that fuels fusion reactions within a strong magnetic field and keeping the plasma as hot and dense as possible for as long as possible. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Lab
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Date:
07/01/2020
LED Irradiation System - Disinfection to Medical Treatments

Modular LED irradiation system equipped with UVC LEDs for disinfection.

For disinfection purposes, the compact system can be equipped with UV LEDs to eliminate germs on critical surfaces such as mobile phones. It can also be assembled with LEDs providing the optimum emission spectrum for polymer curing and medical treatments - even multiple wavelengths are possible. Berlin-based Ferdinand
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Date:
07/01/2020
Research into Next-Generation Automotive Battery Technology

The bipolar lead battery developed by Advanced Battery Concepts will undergo automotive testing regimes

One of the latest technology developments in lead batteries will undergo well-known automotive testing standards in a research project collaboration between Advanced Battery Concepts (ABC) and the Consortium for Battery Innovation (CBI).  Bipolar lead battery technology, which has been
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Date:
07/01/2020
CS Energy Completes 33 MW Texas Solar Portfolio
CS Energy, LLC, has successfully completed a portfolio of solar projects in Texas. At 32.7 MWdc, the portfolio will generate enough renewable energy to power more than 5,000 homes each year. The Texas portfolio is comprised of three separate properties: a 14.5 MW project located in Brooks County; a 7.3 MW
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Date:
07/01/2020
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