PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Computer in wrapping-paper form

New manufacturing approach may lower solar energy costs

2010-09-14
(Press-News.org) Washington, D.C. (September 14, 2010) -- Driven by rapid global industrialization, finite fossil fuel reserves, and the high cost of many alternative energy options, meeting the world's energy challenge may demand novel solutions. One potential solution has its roots in the ubiquitous industrial invention: the factory.

Investigators at SUNY Binghamton's Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM) -- the only center of its kind in the United States -- are giving factory production of solar energy cells a modern makeover. Their approach includes the use of "continuous electronic sheets," something like a computer flattened into wrapping paper to perform its many functions. They describe their new approach in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, which is published by the American Institute of Physics.

Explains lead researcher Howard Wang, "The goal is to apply the next generation of manufacturing to addressing the energy challenge in the way solar cells are produced. We think nanoscale engineering is the key to this new low-cost opportunity for enhancing the solar energy landscape."

Doing this includes: the use of large-scale, flexible format; roll-to-roll manufacturing, a process resembling the printing process of newspapers; and the use of continuous electronic sheets.

To reach this goal, the Wang team devised a promising hybrid material that has high structural quality but is compatible with the roll-to-roll processing technique.

"By driving the cost of production down and maintaining quality with the hybrid," says Wang, "we can create a product that can be competitive with silicon-based products."

INFORMATION: The article, "Vertically Aligned ZnO Nanodisks and Their Uses in Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cells" by Congkang XU, Kaikun Yang, Liwei Huang, and Howard Wang (State University of New York, Binghamton) appears in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy. http://link.aip.org/link/jrsebh/v2/i5/p053101/s1

Journalists may request a free PDF of this article by contacting jbardi@aip.org

JOURNAL OF RENEWABLE AND SUSTAINABLE ENERGY

Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) that covers all areas of renewable and sustainable energy-related fields that apply to the physical science and engineering communities. As an electronic-only, Web-based journal with rapid publication time, JRSE is responsive to the many new developments expected in this field. The interdisciplinary approach of the publication ensures that the editors draw from researchers worldwide in a diverse range of fields. See: http://jrse.aip.org/

ABOUT AIP

The American Institute of Physics is a federation of 10 physical science societies representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world's largest publishers of scientific information in the physical sciences. Offering partnership solutions for scientific societies and for similar organizations in science and engineering, AIP is a leader in the field of electronic publishing of scholarly journals. AIP publishes 12 journals (some of which are the most highly cited in their respective fields), two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings series. Its online publishing platform Scitation hosts nearly two million articles from more than 185 scholarly journals and other publications of 28 learned society publishers.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Lead-free piezoelectric materials of the future

2010-09-14
Washington, D.C. (September 14, 2010) -- Piezoelectric materials have fantastic properties: squeeze them and they generate an electrical field. And vice-versa, they contract or expand when jolted with an electrical pulse. With a name derived from the Greek word meaning to squeeze or press, the piezoelectric effect was just a curiosity after it was discovered in several crystals in 1880. But in 1917, a quartz piezoelectric crystal was at the heart of the world's first submarine-detecting sonar. Piezoelectric materials really took off after the 1950s, with the development ...

New microfluidic chip for discriminating bacteria

2010-09-14
Washington, D.C. (September 14, 2010) -- A new "on-chip" method for sorting and identifying bacteria has been created by biomedical engineers at Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University. The technique, developed by Hsien-Chang Chang, a professor at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Microsystems Engineering, along with former graduate student I-Fang Cheng and their colleagues, is described in the AIP journal Biomicrofluidics. Using roughened glass slides patterned with gold electrodes, the researchers created microchannels to ...

Improving crisis prediction, disaster control and damage reduction

2010-09-14
Washington, D.C. (September 14, 2010) -- Some disasters and crises are related to each other by more than just the common negative social value we assign to them. For example, earthquakes, homicide surges, magnetic storms, and the U.S. economic recession are all kindred of a sort, according to a theoretical framework presented in the journal CHAOS, which is published by the American Institute of Physics. The researchers who developed this framework contend that these four types of events share a precursory development pattern -- a specific change of scale in indicators ...

How do your crystals grow?

2010-09-14
Washington, D.C. (September 14, 2010) -- Because one of the main bottlenecks in determining the structure of protein molecules is producing good isolated single crystals, improved crystallization techniques would be useful in a wide range of genomics and pharmaceutical research. Research reported in The Journal of Chemical Physics uses fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) to investigate the processes at the surface of a growing crystal. By focusing a laser on the crystal surface and measuring the resulting fluorescence, FCS can resolve dimensions as small as a ...

Ending the oceans' 'tragedy of the commons'

2010-09-14
Leading international marine scientists are proposing radical changes in the governance of the world's oceans to rescue them from overfishing, pollution and other human impacts. Based on a successful experiment in Chile, the researchers say a new approach to marine tenure could help to reverse the maritime 'tragedy of the commons' which has led to the depletion of fish stocks worldwide. "Marine ecosystems are in decline around the world. New transformational changes in governance are urgently required to cope with overfishing, pollution, global changes, and other drivers ...

Study shows tranquil scenes have positive impact on brain

2010-09-14
Tranquil living environments can positively affect the human brain function, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield. The research, which was published in the journal NeuroImage, uses functional brain imaging to assess how the environment impacts upon our brain functions. The findings demonstrated that tranquil environmental scenes containing natural features, such as the sea, cause distinct brain areas to become 'connected' with one another whilst man-made environments, such as motorways, disrupt the brain connections. The research involved academics ...

Measuring preference for multitasking

Measuring preference for multitasking
2010-09-14
INDIANAPOLIS – A new study led by Elizabeth Poposki, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology in the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, may help employers identify employees who enjoy multitasking and are less inclined to quit jobs involving multitasking. The study presents a new tool developed to measure preference for multitasking, information which may be of interest to bosses who tire of repeatedly hiring and training new employees. A growing number of individuals must multitask at work and positions requiring a significant amount ...

Largest ever white-shouldered ibis count

2010-09-14
A record-breaking 429 White-shouldered Ibis Pseudibis davisoni have just been recorded in Cambodia, making the known global population much larger than previously thought. With so many birds remaining in the wild the chances of conservation success are greatly improved – welcome news for this Critically Endangered bird species. The University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, brought together a group of conservationists for a coordinated survey of 37 roost sites across Cambodia. Participants came from the Cambodian Forestry Administration and General Department for Administration ...

Research will help ID bodies left behind by Chilean earthquake, Pinochet regime

Research will help ID bodies left behind by Chilean earthquake, Pinochet regime
2010-09-14
New research from North Carolina State University will help medical examiners and others identify human remains of those killed during the recent earthquake in Chile, as well as the bodies of the "disappeared" who were killed during the Pinochet administration. "We have developed population-specific identification criteria for the Chilean population, which will help us determine the stature and biological sex of skeletal remains," says Dr. Ann Ross, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research. "My ...

Hybrids as city runabouts, natural gas fueled cars for the country

Hybrids as city runabouts, natural gas fueled cars for the country
2010-09-14
Hybrid cars and those fuelled by natural gas produce significantly less carbon dioxide (CO2) than equivalent vehicles running on gasoline. In the course of a study undertaken on behalf of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), the results of which were recently published, Empa has investigated the CO2 emission behavior of current hybrid cars. A comparison with gasoline and natural gas fuelled vehicles concludes that hybrid vehicles are the cleanest during inner-city driving whilst natural gas fuelled cars do best on the motorway. When driven in rural areas, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

NYUAD researchers find link between brain growth and mental health disorders

Aging-related inflammation is not universal across human populations, new study finds

University of Oregon to create national children’s mental health center with $11 million federal grant

Rare achievement: UTA undergrad publishes research

Fact or fiction? The ADHD info dilemma

Genetic ancestry linked to risk of severe dengue

Genomes reveal the Norwegian lemming as one of the youngest mammal species

Early birds get the burn: Monash study finds early bedtimes associated with more physical activity

Groundbreaking analysis provides day-by-day insight into prehistoric plankton’s capacity for change

Southern Ocean saltier, hotter and losing ice fast as decades-long trend unexpectedly reverses

Human fishing reshaped Caribbean reef food webs, 7000-year old exposed fossilized reefs reveal

Killer whales, kind gestures: Orcas offer food to humans in the wild

Hurricane ecology research reveals critical vulnerabilities of coastal ecosystems

Montana State geologist’s Antarctic research focuses on accumulations of rare earth elements

Groundbreaking cancer therapy clinical trial with US Department of Energy’s accelerator-produced actinium-225 set to begin this summer

Tens of thousands of heart attacks and strokes could be avoided each year if cholesterol-lowering drugs were used according to guidelines

Leading cancer and metabolic disease expert Michael Karin joins Sanford Burnham Prebys

Low-intensity brain stimulation may restore neuron health in Alzheimer's disease

Four-day school week may not be best for students, review finds

Using music to explore the dynamics of emotions

How the brain supports social processing as people age

Túngara frog tadpoles that grew up in the city developed faster but ended up being smaller

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke

UCLA researchers uncover key mechanism of brain repair in vascular dementia, revealing promising therapeutic target

Why Human empathy still matters in the age of AI

COVID-19 and cognitive change in a community-based cohort

Intent to test for COVID-19 in the postpandemic era

Landmark study investigates potential of Ambroxol, a cough medicine, to slow Parkinson’s-related dementia

Finding suggests treatment approach for autoimmune diseases

A new “link” to triple-negative breast cancer

[Press-News.org] Computer in wrapping-paper form
New manufacturing approach may lower solar energy costs