Power and Electrical Engineering

Desalination is often touted as one solution to the world’s water woes, but current desalination plants tend to hog energy.

Now University of Florida researchers have developed a technology that can tap waste heat from electrical power plants as its main source of energy, an advance that could significantly reduce the cost of desalination in some parts of the world.

“In the future, we have to go to desalination, because the freshwater supply at the moment can just

The emerging field of molecular electronics — using nanoscale molecules as key components in computers and other electronic devices — is in excellent health and has a bright future, conclude UCLA, Caltech and University of California, Santa Barbara, chemists who assess the field in the Dec. 17 issue of the journal Science. “Molecular electronics is in its infancy, and its adolescence and adulthood will be very exciting as we push toward the promise of molecular electronics: smaller, more v

University of California scientists working with a researcher from Washington State University at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Superconductivity Technology Center have developed a novel method for creating high performance, inorganic metal-oxide films using polymer-assisted deposition, or PAD. The breakthrough could pave the way for a greater use of metal-oxide films into the electronics manufacturing industry.

“The successful creation of both simple and complex metal-oxide

Researchers use pentacene to develop next-generation solar power

As the price of energy continues to rise, businesses are looking to renewable energy for cheaper sources of power. Making electricity from the most plentiful of these sources – the sun -can be expensive due to the high price of producing traditional silicon-based solar cells. Enter organic solar cells. Made from cheaper materials, their flexibility and feather-weight construction promise to open up new markets for

New microchip is 10 times smaller and 100 times more energy efficient than currently used chips

University of Alberta researchers have designed a computer chip that uses about 100 times less energy than current state-of-the-art digital chips. The greatly reduced energy consumption of this novel technology offers promise for many small devices with relatively low power needs. This technology could one day eliminate the need to recharge cellphones, help introduce smaller, ultra-high

Time is money, especially to the semiconductor industry. Electronics manufacturers use extremely sophisticated equipment to churn out the latest microchips, but they have a timing problem. It’s very difficult to get all the fabrication tools in a manufacturing line to agree on the time. Components within a single tool can disagree on the time by as much as two minutes, because of a lack of synchronization.

According to a new report by the National Institute of Standards and Tech