Oct

7

Wood Floors Can Be Engineered to Produce Electrical Current

October 7, 2021 | Leave a Comment

Researchers from Switzerland are tapping into an unexpected energy source right under our feet – wood flooring. Their nanogenerator has been presented in the journal Matter. The nanogenerator enables wood to generate energy from our footfalls. The team also improved the wood used in the their nanogenerator with a combination of a silicone coating and […]

Feb

21

Progress on the Thermoelectric Front

February 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

Researchers from Boston College, MIT, Clemson University and the University of Virginia have used a nanotechnology processing technology to achieve a 60 to 90 percent increase in the thermoelectric figure of merit of p-type half-Heusler, a common bulk semiconductor compound. The team’s paper has been published in the journal Nano Letters. Half-Heusler compounds and the […]

Sep

9

A New Player In Waste Heat Recovery

September 9, 2010 | 5 Comments

According to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 2008 report (a pdf), more than two-thirds of the fuel used to generate power in the United States is lost as heat.  The report claims the U. S. has the lowest energy productivity (a measure of how much raw energy goes into every dollar of GDP) of any […]

Mar

29

Batteries vs. Generators or Both

March 29, 2010 | 9 Comments

Tiny generators that could produce enough electricity from random, ambient vibrations to power a wristwatch, pacemaker or wireless sensor would offset a bit of lithium and stacked might replace some of those transformer blocks to recharge batteries. Khalil Najafi, chair of electrical and computer engineering and Tzeno Galchev, a doctoral student at the University of […]

Mar

24

Hydrogen Fuel from Sound

March 24, 2010 | 6 Comments

Sound is energy is motion whether in gasses, fluids or through solid materials it could be something worth pursuit. A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is on it with a new material made from crystals of zinc oxide that, when immersed in water, absorb vibrations and develop areas of strong negative and positive charge. […]

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