#android-computer

www.inhandnetworks.com

Researchers have produced uniform antimony nanocrystals for the first time, taking a big step forward in the exploration of alternative energy storage.

Researchers from Empa and ETH Zurich have succeeded for the first time to produce uniform antimony nanocrystals. Tested as components of laboratory batteries, these are able to store a large number of both lithium and sodium ions. These nanomaterials operate with high rate and may eventually be used as alternative anode materials in future high-energy-density batteries.

The hunt is on – for new materials to be used in the next generation of batteries that may one day replace current lithium ion batteries. Today, the latter are commonplace and provide a reliable power source fo4g LTE routerr smartphones, laptops and many other portable electrical devices. On the one hand, however, electric mobility and stationary electricity storage demand a greater number of more powerful batteries; and the high demand for lithium may eventually lead to a shortage of the raw material. This is why conceptually identical technology based on sodium ions will receive increasing attention in coming years. Although researched for 20 years, materials that can store sodium ions remain scarce.

Antimony electrodes?

A team from Empa and ETH Zurich headed by Empa researcher Maksym  IIoT  Kovalenko may have come a step closer to identifying alternative battery materials: they have become the first to synthesize uniform antimony nanocrystals, the special properties of which make them prime candidates for an anode material for both lithium ion and sodium ion batteries. The results of the scientists’ study have just been published in Nano Letters.

For a long time, antimony has been regarded as a promising anode material for high-performance lithium ion batteries as this metalloid exhibits a high charging capacity, by a factor of two higher than that of commonly used graphite. Initial studies revealed that antimony could be suitable for rechargeable lithium and sodium ion batteries because it is able to store both kinds of ions. Sodium is regarded as a possible low-cost alternative to lithium as it is much more naturally abundant and its reserves are more evenly distributed on Earth.

For antimony to achieve its high storage capability, however, it needs to be produced in a special form. The researchers managed to chemically synthesize uniform – so-called “monodisperse” – antimony nanocrystals that were between ten and twenty nanometers in size. Nanocrystals have a decisive advantage over particles of larger sizes: the full lithiation or sodiation of antimony leads to large volumetric changes. Using nanocrystals, these modulations of the volume can be reversible and fast, and do not lead to the immediate fracture of the material. An additional important advantage of nanocrystals (or nanoparticles) is that they can be intermixed with a conductive carbon filler in order to prevent the aggregation of the nanoparticles.

Ideal candidate for anode material

Electrochemical tests showed that electrodes made of antimony nanocrystals perform equally well in sodium and in lithium ion batteries. This makes antimony particularly promising for sodium batteries because the best lithium-storing anode materials (graphite and silicon) do not operate with sodium.

Highly monodisperse nanocrystals, with the size deviation of ten percent or less, allow identifying the optimal size-performance relationship. Nanocrystals of ten nanometers or smaller suffer from oxidation because of the excessive surface area. On the other hand, antimony crystals with a diameter of more than 100 nanometers aren’t sufficiently stable due to aforementioned massive volume expansion and contraction during the operation of a battery. The researchers achieved the best results with 20 nanometer large particles.

Another important outcome of the study, enabled by these ultra-uniform particles, is that the researchers identified a size range of around 20 to 100 nanometers, within which this material shows excellent, size-independent performance, both in terms of energy density and rate-capability. These features even allow using polydisperse antimony particles to obtain the same performance as with very monodisperse particles, as long as their sizes remain within this size-range of 20 to 100 nanometers. Experiments of Kovalenko’s group on monodisperse nanoparticles of other materials show much steeper size-performance relationships such as quick performance decay with increasing the particle size, placing antimony into a unique position among the materials which alloy with lithium and sodium. “This greatly simplifies the task of finding an economically viable synthesis method”, Kovalenko says. “Development of such cost-effective synthesis is the next step for us, together with our industrial partner.”

More expensive alternative

Does this mean that an alternative to today’s lithium ion batteries is within our grasp? Kovalenko shakes his head. Although the method is relatively straightforward, the production of a sufficient number of high-quality uniform antimony nanocrystals is still too expensive. “All in all, batteries with sodium ions and antimony nanocrystals as anodes will only constitute a highly promising alternative to today’s lithium ion batteries if production costs will be comparable,” he says.

Grid Analytics System

It will most likely be another decade or so before a sodium ion battery with antimony electrodes could hit the market. The research on the topic is still only in its infancy. “However, other research groups will soon join the efforts,” the chemist is convinced.

In short: Lithium ion batteries

A current lithium ion battery comprises two electrodes – a cathode and an anode. The anode is often made of graphite, the cathode of metal oxides such as cobalt oxide. The lithium ions lodge themselves in these materials during the charging or discharging processes. The two electrodes are separated by a separator permeable only for lithium ions traveling between the two electrodes. During battery discharge, the lithium ions shift from the anode to the cathode. The electrons take a “detour” via an external electronic device, which is powered by the resulting electron flux. Electrons and ions meet again at the cathode. When the battery is charging, lithium ions and electrons flow in the opposite direction. For the battery to work effectively and for a long time, the ions need to be able to move in and out of the electrode materials easily. The shape and size of the electrode materials should not change much through the recurrent absorption and release of the ions.

Publication: Meng He, et al., “Monodisperse Antimony Nanocrystals for High-Rate Li-ion and Na-ion Battery Anodes: Nano versus Bulk,” Nano Lett., 2014, 14 (3), pp 1255–1262;DOI: 10.1021/nl404165c

Image: ETH Zurich

www.inhandnetworks.com

Sandia chemist Tina Nenoff heads a team of researchers focused on removal of radioactive iodine from spent nuclear fuel. They identified a metal-organic framework that captures and holds the volatile gas, a discovery that could be used for nuclear fuel reprocessing and other applications.

A research team, comprised of Sandia chemists, is researching ways to make nuclear fuel reprocessing cleaner and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes. By focusing on the radioactive components that can’t be burned as fuel, the goal is to find a methodology for highly selective separations. By using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), they are able to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste.

Sandia chemist Tina Nenoff heads a team of researchers focused on removal of radioactive iodine from spent nuclear fuel. They identified a metal-organic framework that captures and holds the volatile gas, a discovery that could be used for nuclear fuel reprocessing and other applications. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. “This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture,” said chemist Tina Nenoff of Sandia’s Surface and Interface Sciences Department.

The discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents. A characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel can be reprocessed to recover fissile materials and provide fresh fuel for nuclear power plants. Countries such as France, Russia and India are reprocessing spent fuel.

The process also reduces the volume of high-level wastes, a key concern of the Sandia researchers. “The goal is to find a methodology for highly selective separations that result in less waste being interred,” Nenoff said.

Part of the challenge of reprocessing is to separate and isolate radioactive components that can’t be burned as fuel. The Sandia team focused on removing iodine, whose isotopes have a half-life of 16 million years, from spent fuel.

They studied known materials, including silver-loaded zeolite, a crystalline, porous mineral with regular pore openings, high surface area and high mechanical, thermal and chemical stability. Various zeolite frameworks can trap and remove iodine from a stream of spent nuclear fuel, but need added silver to work well.

“Silver attracts iodine to form silver iodide,” Nenoff said. “The zeolite holds the silver in its pores and then reacts IIoT   with iodine to trap silver iodide.”

But silver is expensive and poses environmental problems, so the team set out to engineer materials without silver that would work like zeolites but have higher capacity for the gas molecules. They explored why and how zeolite absorbs iodine, and used the critical components discovered to find the best MOF, named ZIF-8.

“We investigated the structural properties on how they work and translated that into new and improved materials,” Nenoff said.

MOFs are crystalline, porous materials in which a metal center is bound to organic molecules by mild self-assembly chemical synthesis. The choice of metal and organic resul din rail mounting  t in a very specific final framework.

The trick was to find a MOF highly selective for iodine. The Sandia researchers took the best elements of the zeolite Mordenite — its por Industrial LTE Router  es, high surface area, stability and chemical absorption — and identified a MOF that can separate one molecule, in this case iodine, from a stream of molecules. The MOF and pore-trapped iodine gas can then be incorporated into glass waste for long-term storage.

This illustration of a metal-organic framework, or MOF, shows the metal center bound to organic molecules. Each MOF has a specific framework determined by the choice of metal and organic. Sandia chemists identified a MOF whose pore size and high surface area can separate and trap radioactive iodine molecules from a stream of spent nuclear fuel.

The Sandia team also fabricated MOFs, made of commercially available products, into durable pellets. The as-made MOF is a white powder with a tendency to blow around. The pellets provide a stable form to use without loss of surface area, Nenoff said.

Sandia has applied for a patent on the pellet technology, which could have commercial applications.

The Sandia researchers are part of the Off-Gas Sigma Team, which is led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and studies waste-form capture of volatile gasses associated with nuclear fuel reprocessing. Other team members — Pacific Northwest, Argonne and Idaho national laboratories — are studying other volatile gases such as krypton, tritium and carbon.

The project began six years ago and the Sigma Team was formalized in 2009. It is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy.

Sandia’s iodine and MOFs research was featured in two recent articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society authored by Nenoff and team members Dorina Sava, Mark Rodriguez, Jeffery Greathouse, Paul Crozier, Terry Garino, David Rademacher, Ben Cipiti, Haiqing Liu, Greg Halder, Peter Chupas, and Karena Chapman. Chupas, Halder and Chapman are from Argonne.

“The most important thing we did was introduce a new class of materials to nuclear waste remediation,” said Sava, postdoctoral appointee on the project.

Nenoff said another recent paper in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research shows a one-step process that incorporates MOFs with iodine in a low-temperature, glass waste form. “We have a volatile off-gas capture using a MOF and we have a durable waste form,” Nenoff said.

Nenoff and her colleagues are continuing their research into new and optimized MOFs for enhanced volatile gas separation and capture.

“We’ve shown that MOFs have the capacity to capture and, more importantly, retain many times more iodine than current materials technologies,” said Argonne’s Chapman.

Image: Randy Montoya; Sandia National Laboratories

www.inhandnetworks.com

One of the researchers’ new photon detectors, deposited athwart a light channel — or “waveguide” (horizontal black band) — on a silicon optical chip.

In a new study, researchers describe a micrometer-scale flip-chip process that enables scalable integration of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors on a range of photonic circuits.

A team of researchers has built an array of light detectors sensitive enough to register the arrival of individual light particles, or photons, and mounted them on a silicon optical chip. Such arrays are crucial components of devices that use photons to perform quantum computations.

Single-photon detectors are notoriously temperamental: Of 100 deposited on a chip using standard manufacturing techniques, only a handful will generally work. In a paper appearing in Nature Communications, the researchers at MIT and elsewhere describe a procedure for fabricating and testing the detectors separately and then transferring those that work to an optical chip built using standard manufacturing processes.

In addition to yielding much denser and larger arrays, the approach also increases the detectors’ sensitivity. In experiments, the researchers found that their detectors were up to 100 times more likely to accurately register the arrival of a single photon than those found in earlier arrays.

“You make both parts — the detectors and the photonic chip — through their best fabrication process, which is dedicated, and then bring them together,” explains Faraz Najafi, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the new paper.

Thinking small

According to quantum mechanics, tiny physical particles are, counterintuitively, able to inhabit mutually exclusive states at the same time. A computational element made from such a particle — known as a quantum bit, or qubit — could thus represent zero and one simultaneously. If multiple qubits are “entangled,” meaning that their quantum states depend on each other, then a single quantum computation is, in some sense, like performing many computations in parallel.

With most particles, entanglement is difficult to maintain, but it’s relatively easy with photons. For that reason, optical systems are a promising approach to quantum co industrial iot  mputation. But any quantum computer — say, one whose qubits are laser-trapped ion automation  s or nitrogen atoms embedded in diamond — would still benefit from using entangled photons to move quantum information around.

“Because ultimately one will want to make such optical processors with maybe tens or hundreds of photonic qubits, it becomes unwieldy to do this using traditional optical components,” says Dirk Englund, the Jamieson Career Development Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and corresponding author on the new paper. “It’s not only unwieldy but probably impossible, because if you tried to build it on a large optical table, simply the random motion of the table would cause noise on these optical states. So there’s been an effort to miniaturize these optical circuits onto photonic integrated circuits.”

The project was a collaboration between Englund’s group and the Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group, which is led by Karl Berggren, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and of which Najafi is a member. The MIT researchers were also joined by colleagues at IBM and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Relocation

The researchers’ process begins with a silicon optical chip made using conventional manufacturing techniques. On a separate silicon chip, they grow a thin, flexible film of silicon nitride, upon which they deposit the superconductor niobium nitride in a pattern useful for photon detection. At both ends of the resulting detector, they deposit gold electrodes.

Then, to one end of the silicon nitride film, they attach a small droplet of polydimethylsiloxane, a type of silicone. They then press a tungsten probe, typically used to measure voltages in experimental chips, against the silicone.

“It’s almost like Silly Putty,” Englund says. “You put it down, it spreads out and makes high surface-contact area, and when you pick it up quickly, it will maintain that large surface area. And then it relaxes back so that it comes back to one point. It’s like if you try to pick up a coin with your finger. You press on it and pick it up quickly, and shortly after, it will fall off.”

With the tungsten probe, the researchers peel the film off its substrate and attach it to the optical chip.

In previous arrays, the detectors registered only 0.2 percent of the single photons directed at them. Even on-chip detectors deposited individually have historically topped out at about 2 percent. But the detectors on the researchers’ new chip got as high as 20 percent. That’s still a long way from the 90 percent or more required for a practical quantum circuit, but it’s a big step in the right direction.

“This work is a technical tour de force,” says Robert Hadfield, a professor of photonics at the router industrial   University of Glasgow who was not involved in the research. “There is potential for scale-up to large circuits requiring hundreds of detectors using commercial pick-and-place technology.”

Publication: Faraz Najafi,et al., “On-chip detection of non-classical light by scalable integration of single-photon detectors,” Nature Communications 6, Article number: 5873; doi:10.1038/ncomms6873

Image: Courtesy of Nature Communications

www.inhandnetworks.com

Liquid-gated membranes (white, on left) offer a more economical, less energy-intensive way to filter substances from liquids, as their specially coated, porous surfaces (right, SEM image) resist accumulation and can be tuned to allow particles of specific sizes to pass through. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Filtering and treating water,  Industrial IoT Gateway  both for human consumption and to clean industrial and municipal wastewater, accounts for about 13 percent of all electricity consumed in the U.S. and releases about 290 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year — roughly equivalent to the combined weight of every human on earth.

One of the most common methods of processing water is passing it through a membrane with pores that are sized to filter out particles that are larger than water molecules. However, these membranes are susceptible to “fouling” — clogging by the very materials they are designed to filter out — necessitating more electricity to force the water through a partially clogged membrane and frequent membrane replacement, both of which increase water-treatment costs.

New research from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and collaborators at Northeastern University and the University of Waterloo demonstrates that the Wyss’ liquid-gated membranes (LGMs) filter nanoclay particles out of water with twofold higher efficiency and nearly threefold longer time to foul, and reduce the pressure required for filtration over conventional membranes. It’s a solution that could reduce the cost and electricity consumption of high-impact industrial processes such as oil and gas drilling. The study is reported in APL Materials.

“This is the first study to demonstrate that LGMs can achieve sustained filtration in settings similar to those found in heavy industry, and it provides insight into how LGMs resist different types of fouling, which could lead to their use in a variety of water-processing settings,” said first author Jack Alvarenga, a research scientist at the Wyss Institute.

LGMs mimic nature’s use of liquid-filled pores to control the movement of liquids, gases, and particles through biological filters using the least energy possible, much like the small stomata openings in plants’ leaves allow gases to pass through. Each LGM is coated with a liquid that acts as a reversible gate, filling and sealing its pores in the “closed” state. When pressure is applied to the membrane, the liquid inside the pores is pulled to the sides, creating open, liquid-lined pores that can be tuned to allow the passage of specific liquids or gases, and that resist fouling due to the liquid layer’s slippery surface. The use of fluid-lined pores also enables the separation of a target compound from a mixture of different substances, which is common in industrial liquid processing.

The research team decided to test the LGMs on a suspension of bentonite clay in water, as such “nanoclay” solutions mimic the wastewater produced by drilling activities in the oil and gas industry. They infused  Industrial 3G Router  25 mm discs of a standard filter membrane with perfluoropolyether, a type of liquid lubricant that has been used in the aerospace industry for more than 30 years, to convert them into LGMs. They then placed the membranes under pressure to draw water through the pores but leave the nanoclay particles behind, and compared the performance of untreated membranes to LGMs.

The untreated membranes displayed signs of nanoclay fouling much more quickly than the LGMs, and the LGMs were able to filter water three times longer than the standard membranes before requiring a “backwash” procedure to remove particles that had accumulated on the membrane. Less frequent backwashing could translate to a reduction in the use of cleaning chemicals and energy required to pump backwash water, and improve the filtration rate in industrial water treatment settings.

While the LGMs did eventually experience fouling, 60 percent less nanoclay accumulated in their structures during filtration, an accumulation known as “irreversible fouling” because it is not removed by backwashing. This advantage gives LGMs a longer lifespan and makes more of the filtrate recoverable for alternate uses. Additionally, the LGMs required 16 percent less pressure to initiate filtration, adding to the energy savings.

“LGMs have the potential for use in industries as diverse as food and bev remote communication  erage processing, biopharmaceutical manufacturing, textiles, paper, pulp, chemical, and petrochemical, and could offer improvements in energy use and efficiency across a wide swath of industrial applications,” said corresponding author Joanna Aizenberg, who is a founding core faculty member of the Wyss Institute and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Material Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The team’s next steps for the research include larger-scale pilot studies with industry partners, longer-term operation of the LGMs, and filtering even more complex mixtures of substances. These studies will provide insight into the commercial viability of LGMs for different applications, and how long they would last in a number of uses.

“The concept of using a liquid to help filter other liquids, while perhaps not obvious to us, is prevalent in nature. It’s wonderful to see how leveraging nature’s innovation in this manner can potentially lead to huge energy savings,” said Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as professor of bioengineering at SEAS.

Additional authors of the paper include Yuki Ainge from Northeastern University; Chris Williams and Aubrey Maltz from the University of Waterloo; and Tom Blough and Mughees Khan from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

Publication: Jack Alvarenga, et al., “Liquid gated membrane filtration performance with inorganic particle suspensions,” APL Materials 6, 100703 (2018); 10.1063/1.5047480

www.inhandnetworks.com

An expanding, ring-shaped cloud of atoms shares several striking features with the early universe. (Credit: E. Edwards/JQI)

Researchers playing with a cloud of ultracold atoms uncovered behavior that bears a striking resemblance to the universe in microcosm. Their work, which forges new connections between atomic physics and the sudden expansion of the early universe, was published April 19 in Physical Review X and featured in Physics.

“From the atomic physics perspective, the experiment is beautifully described by existing theory,” says Stephen Eckel, an atomic physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the lead author of the new paper. “But even more striking is how that theory connects with cosmology.”

In several sets of experiments, Eckel and his colleagues rapidly expanded the size of a doughnut-shaped cloud of atoms, taking snapshots during the process. The growth happens so fast that the cloud is left humming, and a related hum may have appeared on cosmic scales during the rapid expansion of the early universe—an epoch that cosmologists refer to as  plc programming  the period of inflation.

The work brought together experts in atomic physics and gravity, and the authors say it is a testament to the versatility of the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)—an ultracold cloud of atoms that can be described as a single quantum object—as a platform for testing ideas from other areas of physics.

“Maybe this will one day inform future models of cosmology,” Eckel says. “Or vice versa. Maybe there will be a model of cosmology that’s difficult to solve but that you could simulate using a cold atomic gas.”

It’s not the first time that researchers have connected BECs and cosmology. Prior studies mimicked black holes and searched for analogs of the radiation predicted to pour forth from their shadowy boundaries. The new experiments focus instead on the BEC’s response to a rapid expansion, a process that suggests several analogies to what may have happened during the period of inflation.

The first and most direct analogy involves the way that waves travel through an expanding medium. Such a situation doesn’t arise often in physics, but it happened during inflation on a grand scale. During that expansion, space itself stretched any waves to much larger sizes and stole energy from them through a process known as Hubble friction.

In one set of experiments, researchers spotted analogous features in their cloud of atoms. They imprinted a sound wave onto their cloud—alternating regions of more atoms and fewer atoms around the ring, like a wave in the early universe—and watched it disperse during expansion. Unsurprisingly, the sound wave stretched out, but its amplitude also decreased. The math revealed that this damping looked just like Hubble friction, and the behavior was captured well by calculations and numerical simulations.

“It’s like we’re hitting the BEC with a hammer,” says Gretchen Campbell, the NIST co-director of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and a coauthor of the paper, “and it’s sort of shocking to me that these simulations so nicely replicate what&rsq inhand network  uo;s going on.”

In a second set of experiments, the team uncovered another, more speculative analogy. For these tests they left the BEC free of any sound waves but provoked the same expansion, watching the BEC slosh back and forth until it relaxed.

In a way, that relaxation also resembled inflation. Some of the energy that drove the expansion of the universe ultimately ended up creating all of the matter and light around us. And although there are many theories for how this happened, cosmologists aren’t exactly sure how that leftover energy got converted into all the stuff we see today.

In the BEC, the energy of the expansion was quickly transferred to things like sound waves traveling around the ring. Some early guesses for why this was happening looked promising, but they fell short of predicting the energy transfer accurately. So the team turned to numerical simulations that could capture a more complete picture of the physics.

What emerged was a complicated account of the energy conversion: After the expansion stopped, atoms at the outer edge of the ring hit their new, expanded boundary and got reflected back toward the center of the cloud. There, they interfered with atoms still traveling outward, creating a zone in the middle where almost no atoms could live. Atoms on either side of this inhospitable area had mismatched quantum properties, like two neighboring clocks that are out of sync.

The situation was highly unstable and eventually collapsed, leading to the creation of vortices throughout the cloud. These vortices, or little quantum whirlpools, would break apart and generate sound waves that ran around the ring, like the particles and radiation left over after inflation. Some vortices even escaped from the edge of the BEC, creating an imbalance that left the cloud rotating.

Unlike the analogy to Hubble friction, the complicated story of how sloshing atoms can create dozens of quantum whirlpools may bear no resemblance to what goes on during and after inflation. But Ted Jacobson, a coauthor of the new paper and a physics professor at the University of Maryland specializing in black holes, says that his interaction with atomic physicists yielded benefits outside these technical results.

“What I learned from them, an Vending Telemeter  d from thinking so much about an experiment like that, are new ways to think about the cosmology problem,” Jacobson says. “And they learned to think about aspects of the BEC that they would never have thought about before. Whether those are useful or important remains to be seen, but it was certainly stimulating.”

Eckel echoes the same thought. “Ted got me to think about the processes in BECs differently,” he says, “and any time you approach a problem and you can see it from a different perspective, it gives you a better chance of actually solving that problem.”

Future experiments may study the complicated transfer of energy during expansion more closely, or even search for further cosmological analogies. “The nice thing is that from these results, we now know how to design experiments in the future to target the different effects that we hope to see,” Campbell says. “And as theorists come up with models, it does give us a testbed where we could actually study those models and see what happens.”

Publication: S. Eckel, et al., “A Rapidly Expanding Bose-Einstein Condensate: An Expanding Universe in the Lab,” Phys. Rev. X, 2018; doi:10.1103/PhysRevX.8.021021

www.inhandnetworks.com

UCLA researchers have demonstrated the use of spin wave flow to move the domain wall in a magnetic device, allowing the harvest of wasted energy. Courtesy of UCLA and Physical Review Letters

In a newly published study, researchers at UCLA demonstrate how to add power to a spintronics device by harnessing excess heat and converting it for practical use.

FINDINGS: Imagine how much you could save on your electricity bill if you could use the excess heat your computer generates to actually power the machine.

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have taken an important step toward harnessing that heat and converting it for practical use. The advance could lead to more energy-efficient appliances and information processing devices.

The research team, led by Kang Wang, UCLA’s Raytheon Professor of Electrical Engineering, demonstrates how to add power to a spintronics device, which uses the spin of electrons for energy rather than their charge.

Excess heat, like that generated by extended use of a computer or other device, naturally creates what is known as a spin wave that can move a domain wall. A domain wall separates magnetic materials that point in different directions in certain magnetic devices.

If housed within the central processing unit of a computer or other electrical device, a domain wall would serve as a sort of turbine, capturing the heat from the traveling spin wave and converting it into energy, just as a turbine harnesses the power of water and converts it into electrical energy that can be used to redirect the water or serve another purpose. The captured energy can then be used to help power the e distribution automation  lectrical device.

The concept of using heat energy to move magnetic domain walls is not new, according to researchers, but this paper is th digital signage  e first demonstration of moving a domain wall through propagation of a spin wave.

IMPACT: Researchers said the capture of heat energy can serve to supplement the power provided by traditional CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) circuits in devices from smartphones to computer servers and large electrical equipment. In the long run, the process may serve as an alternative to CMOS circuits in many devices.

AUTHORS: The study’s lead authors are UCLA postdoctoral researcher Wanjun Jiang and UCLA graduate student Pramey Industrial 3G Router   Upadhyaya. The principal investigator on the research is Kang Wang.

Other authors include Yaroslav Tserovnyak, UCLA associate professor physics and astronomy; Robert N. Schwartz, UCLA visiting professor of chemistry and biochemistry; UCLA postdoctoral researchers Sergiy Cherepov, Kin Wong and Jing Zhao; UCLA graduate students Li-Te Chang, Yabin Fan, Murong Lang, Mark Lewis, Yen-Ting Lin, Jianshi Tang and Minsheng Wang; and Xuezhi Zhou, a researcher at Canada’s University of Manitoba.

FUNDING: Researchers received financial support from the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN) and the Center for Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics (FENA) at UCLA, which are sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Semiconductor Industry Consortium and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

JOURNAL: The research was published online in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters on (abstract/PRL/v110/i17/e177202) and will appear in an upcoming print edition of the journal. Wanjun Jiang, et al., “Direct Imaging of Thermally Driven Domain Wall Motion in Magnetic Insulators,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 177202 (2013); DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.177202

Image: Courtesy of UCLA and Physical Review Letters.

www.inhandnetworks.com

Although Congress defunded the January 1st bill, the federal law still exists and the incandescent light bulb may soon be a thing of the past. It’s a go retail  od thing Thomas Edison isn’t here to see these lights go out. Ne Touchscreen & Vending PC  w efficiency standards will gradually do away with his creation in favor of new technologies that consume at least 25 percent less energy.

Another factor in play here is that consumers want more energy efficient options. Starting January 1st, the 100-watt bulb will no longer be manufactured, then in January of 2013 the 75-watt version will be gone and in 2014, the 40-watt and 60-watt bulbs will be no more. Stores can still sell their remaining stock. They just won’t get any more to put on the shelves. When California implemented the standards last year, 100-watt bulbs were still available for a few months.

If you absolutely need to get a 100-watt bulb outside of California, Bill Hamilton of Home Depot says th Remote PLC programming  at they have enough stock to last them through June.

These old bulbs will be replaced primarily by LED technology, which is seeing amazing growth thanks to these new standards.

www.inhandnetworks.com

Sometimes when looking at one aspect of science, researchers find another. When this happens, it can be science gold. In this case, a seismology tool used for monitoring underwater earthquakes is being used to track the endangered fin whale. That’s because hydrophones used to listen to the sounds of seafloor activity can also hear the low-frequency calls of fin whales.

Seismologist William Wilcock of the University of Washington-Seattle used hydrophones for three years that were located near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. He developed algorithms to detect and filter out the whale sounds. But then they turned the tablesGrid Analytics System and listened specifically for the whales.

Scientists were able to trace individual whale calls t Industrial 3G Router  hrough an entire network of seafloor sensors, and were able to determine whale “tracks” as they moved above the hydrothermal vents. They also linked calls to whale behavior and group size. The next step is to expand these data-extraction methods to other seismic monitoring stations in the region and that sho 3g modem  uld give them a more detailed idea of whale activities.

Science overlap and partnerships can be very rewarding.