Power and Electrical Engineering

A strain of yeast developed at Purdue University more effectively makes ethanol from agricultural residues that would otherwise be discarded or used as animal feed, and the first license for the yeast has been issued to the biotechnology company Iogen Corp.

Purdue’s genetically altered yeast allows about 40 percent more ethanol to be made from sugars derived from agricultural residues, such as corn stalks and wheat straw, compared with “wild-type” yeasts that occur in nature.

In the June 2004 issue of Mechanical Engineering, a publication of ASME, the magazine reports on a fuel cell that cleans domestic wastewater while producing electrical energy.

This new type of microbial fuel cell, which is in the early stages of research at Pennsylvania State University, takes the high concentration of organic matter found in wastewater and coverts it to energy. “Where a typical fuel cell runs on hydrogen, a microbial fuel cell relies in the anaerobic oxidation of organic ma

Marriage of quantum well, quantum dots could produce white light

A wireless nanodevice that functions like a fluorescent light – but potentially far more efficiently – has been developed in a joint project between the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories.
The experimental success, reported in the June 10 issue of Nature, efficiently causes nanocrystals to emit light when placed on top of a nearby energy source, eliminating the ne

The University of North Dakota (UND) Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) has begun a demonstration project to determine the economic viability and environmental advantage of generating power using a 30-kilowatt microturbine fueled with sour (impure) natural gas often produced along with oil.

The project is being demonstrated at an oil field in Newburg, North Dakota, operated by Amerada Hess Corporation, an international petroleum company with 461 active wells in North Dakota. A Cap

“Nanodumbells” – gold-tipped nanocrystals which can be used as highly-efficient building blocks for devices in the emerging nanotechnology revolution – have been developed by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The technology, developed by a research group headed by Prof. Uri Banin of the Department of Physical Chemistry and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology of the Hebrew University, is described in an article in the current issue of Science magazine.

The

By carving specks of single crystal silicon from a bulk wafer and casting them onto sheets of plastic, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a route to ultrahigh performance, mechanically flexible thin-film transistors. The process could enable new applications in consumer electronics – such as inexpensive wall-to-wall displays and intelligent but disposable radio frequency identification tags – and could even be used in applications that require significant