Researchers have developed world’s first nanofluidic device with complex 3D surfaces which could have enormous implications in applications like nanoscale materials processing, in pharmaceuticals, nanoparticles sorting, and it could help isolating particular DNA strands for further research studies.

The scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology were inspired by the manufacturing process of integrated circuits and they used it at nanoscale. The result is world’s first nanofluidic device with 3D complex surfaces called the “Lilliputian chamber” which will be used with custom-based surfaces to engineer nanoparticles among many other applications. In order to develop a nanofluidic device, researchers have to etch very small channels into a silicon wafer, just like in the manufacturing process of an integrated circuit.

So far, researchers have only managed to develop simple surfaces of only a few depths meaning that you cannot study DNA or other molecules in detail. Now, that their ability is not limited anymore, researchers will be able to study complex surfaces of nanoparticles in detail.  The manufacturing process of integrated circuits is based on “lithographic” procedures, and the researchers used them to develop complex 3D surfaces, then they designed a nanofluidic chamber which featured a staircase geometry engraved in its floor. The steps of the staircase represented a level, each increasing in depth from 10 nanometers to 620 nanometers.

In order to test their Lilliputian chamber with 3D complex surfaces, the researchers used two solutions/materials – first was based on 100-nanometer in diameter of polystyrene spheres, while the latter consisted of 20-micrometer in length DNA molecules. In the tests, the researchers introduced the solution in the deep end of the chamber, then they maneuvered the samples across the chamber using electric fields, and they tracked their movements on a microscope (the polystyrene spheres, and the DNA strands were “tagged” with fluorescent dyes to observe their movement).

The results of the tests were very convincing as when using polystyrene spheres, the so-called “size exclusion” happened when the area of the Lilliputian chamber (the channels were less than 100-nanometers in depth) remained free of the nanoparticles. When using the DNA strands, the molecules were coiled in much deeper channels, and then forced to enter in shallower channels. In other words the results clearly show that NIST’s nanofluidic device can be used to perform complex 3D operations at nanoscale.

The Lilliputian chamber could have enormous implications in various applications like scientific studies, safety invetigations, and for environmental health. The research if only at the beginning, and now the NIST researchers are looking to separate mixtures of nanoparticles, and to study DNA’s behavior in a 3D nanofluidic device.

Throughout the world there are about 8,000 Rubber Tired Gantry cranes which do a lot of damage to the environment due to huge fuel consumption, and gas emissions. In order to reduce the harmful emissions, an ECE researcher called Mark Flynn has developed a device that can be integrated in ports around the world. Dr. Flynn designed a high-speed flywheel motor controller which reduces the fuel consumption of the RTG cranes which are powered by a diesel motor.

The RTG cranes can move a shipping container in three minutes, and this requires a lot of power especially in the lift as these containers weigh 50 metric tons depending on their load. Also, considering the fact that the descent requires a special attention, then you can only imagine how much power the cranes consume. The high-speed flywheel motor controller can be integrated in RTG’s energy storage systems, and it will capture the so-called “braking energy”, and it will use it for the next crane.

VYCON Inc. is the company that produces Flynn’s device, and sea ports are among the best places to test new greener technologies. RTG cranes lose a lot of power when maneuvering containers, and instead of using it for the upcoming containers, the energy is dissipated as wasted heat. Like aforementioned, Flynn’s device captures the energy and uses it for the next load.

According to some field tests in China, the flywheel energy storage system can also lower power requirements which will save a lot of energy. The tests also showed that the fuel consumption was lowered by 38%, while NOx and PM emissions were dramatically cut down. Driven by the success of the VYCON flywheel, now data centers and hospitals are replacing industrial batteries with the high-speed flywheel motor controller.

“Industrial batteries are less expensive initially than a flywheel, but when you factor in maintenance and having to pay for more charge than you need to avoid frequent battery replacement a flywheel-based solution can be considerable less expensive. A VYCON flywheel will last 20 years and eliminates the problem of what to do with 200 large-scale toxic lead-acid batteries,” said Flynn.

You don’t have to be a genius to tell that data centers and hospitals can’t afford blackouts as many lives and businesses depend on them. Although hospitals and data back-up centers have back-up diesel generators, their energy will not be entirely utilized which means that the energy is lost forever. VYCON’s flywheel can handle most power outages, and if an outage persists then the device will absorb “energy abnormalities” and transfer power to generators.

“I am very pleased with the fuel and emissions savings results we are seeing and with additional improvements currently under research that aim to improve the savings further. Future work will investigate the feasibility of using flywheels in subway rail stations to accelerate one train with the braking energy recovered from another. Doing so will not only save energy but can be used to defer or eliminate the costs of adding utility substations as rail service grows,” explained Flynn.

The VYCON flywheel has a promising future ahead of it, we expect even more from the device. It’s not hard to tell that in the 8,000 sea ports around the world, a lot of energy is wasted while harmful emissions are released in the atmosphere damaging the entire eco-system. Maybe this flywheel energy storage system will help us save the planet, and the tests clearly show that. Expert environmentalists just have to “convince” the authorities to integrate the device in sea ports, and later in other applications.

If I learned one thing about concepts and prototypes, I learned that most of them never make it to the production line and with time they are forgotten. However, this is not the case of a prototype device created by researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering. This device is a supercapacitor who usually performs electronic operations thanks to silicon chips, but the USC researchers managed to develop a transparent and flexible supercapacitor using carbon nanotubes.

The team of researchers led by Chongwu Zhou claims that the supercapacitor which uses CNT films and indium-oxide nanowires can be manufactured at prices competitive with conventional techniques which use silicon. Also, this energy storage and conversion device is completely transparent, and is so flexible that it can be “bent and twisted like a poker card.”

According to Zhou, this new capacitor features an energy density of 1.29 watt-hour per kilogram, and a storage capacitance of 64 Farad per gram, while conventional capacitors store an energy density of at most .1 watt-hour per kilogram with a specific capacitance in the range of tens of millifarads. The team consisting of aforementioned Zhou, USC post-doctorate Guozhen Shen, and USC graduate students Sawalok Sukcharoenchoke and Po-Chiang Chen, believes that their supercapacitor will have enormous implications in e-paper displays, many electronic devices, and other applications.

Zhou and his team attached indium-oxide and CNTs films on a transparent flexible substrate, then they optimized its thickness in order to preserve its flexibility and its transparency. The researchers managed to combine metal nanowires with carbon nanotubes (after many attempts) and they said that this represents the key for flexible and transparent supercapacitors as conventional storage devices are not flexible, neither transparent.

“We demonstrated enhanced specific capacitance, power density, energy density, and long operation cycles, compared to those supercapacitors made only by CNTs,” said Zhou. “We successfully produced a prototype of flexible and transparent supercapacitors built on two important nanostructured materials [including metal oxide nanowires and CNTs].”

“CNT films were fabricated by vacuum filtration method. An adhesive and flat poly (dimethysiloxane) (PDMS) stamp was adapted to peel the CNT film off of the filtration membrane and then released it onto a polyethylene terephtalate (PET) substrate. In2O3 nanowires with a diameter of ~ 20 nm and a length of ~ 5 ?m were synthesized by a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method. The as-grown nanowires were sonicated into IPA solutions and then dispersed upon transferred CNT films to form In2O3 nanowire /CNT heterogeneous film for transparent and flexible supercapacitor study,” explained Zhou.

Well, as the researchers have demonstrated the potential of flexible and transparent supercapacitors, now we are waiting for the devices to be commercialized. Zhou said that the new supercapacitors can be manufactured at costs competitive with conventional supercapacitors and we can’t understand why the researcher didn’t mention when the devices will be available. We will have to wait for further details.

I’ve said it many times – nanotechnology is the future. Scientists at the Maryland NanoCenter from the University of Maryland have designed batteries that store energy coming from renewable sources, and which are 10 times more efficient than conventional systems. If you own a hybrid car or if you have solar panels on your roof, then you probably know that the systems which store the power are now very efficient, as you cannot drive long distances, while solar power deliver energy only a part of the day.

The devices that store power from alternative sources are very expensive and inefficient, but this could change in the near future thanks to the research made by the researchers at the University of Maryland.

“Renewable energy sources like solar and wind provide time-varying, somewhat unpredictable energy supply, which must be captured and stored as electrical energy until demanded. Conventional devices to store and deliver electrical energy — batteries and capacitors — cannot achieve the needed combination of high energy density, high power, and fast recharge that are essential for our energy future,” said Gary Rubloff, director of the University of Maryland’s NanoCenter.

The new energy storage devices are based on nanotechnology and they consist of millions of identical nanostructures which were shaped to transport power very fast to the storage surface. The team led by Professor Rubloff and his collaborator, Professor Sang Bok Lee, said that materials act according to the laws of nature, however, they have exploited unusual behaviors of these materials like self-assembly, self-limiting reaction, and self-alignment, and they have created millions of identical nanostructures which receive, store, and deliver electrical power.

“These devices exploit unique combinations of materials, processes, and structures to optimize both energy and power density – combinations that, taken together, have real promise for building a viable next-generation technology, and around it, a vital new sector of the tech economy. The goal for electrical energy storage systems is to simultaneously achieve high power and high energy density to enable the devices to hold large amounts of energy, to deliver that energy at high power, and to recharge rapidly,” said Rubloff.

Energy storage devices are divided in three categories – batteries (most based on lithium-ion) which store a lot of energy, but do not deliver high power and they cannot be recharged quickly; electrochemical capacitors which deliver high power at the price of lower energy density; electrostatic capacitors which deliver high power and can be recharged quickly at the price of lower energy density.

Now, the energy storage devices that the Maryland researchers have developed are called electrostatic nanocapacitors which deliver high power, can be recharge quickly, but they increase the energy density, and according to the team of researchers, these new storage devices are ten times better than conventional devices available on the market.

The nanotech batteries will get improvements soon, and Professors Lee and Rubloff expect them to enter in mass production shortly, and soon we could see them as storage devices for solar panel system and inside a hybrid car battery. Also, on the long run we could see nanotechnology as the “new energy capture technology” and it could be fully-integrated with energy storage devices. Well, ten times more power sounds great, now we just have to wait for the nanotech batteries to be perfected.

The tendency in electronic devices is all about getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It’s just the way these things need to be. However, they also have to be very efficient and we have nanotechnology and carbon nanotubes to make them like this. In order to develop smaller and more efficient electronics, scientists want to develop the next generation of devices based on carbon nanotubes using a technique called “chemical vapor deposition”, but it’s very hard to manipulate these structures and to bring them to a useful state.

A new vision is needed to complete the next-gen electronics and thanks to a breakthrough from scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, our future devices could be built from carbon nanotubes. The team of scientists led by professor Yongfeng Lu and postdoctoral researcher Yunshen Zhou, used a technique based on the so-called “optical near-field effects” and they managed to control the growth of carbon nanotubes. The researchers linked individually self-aligned carbon nanotubes with sharp-tipped electrodes, a process which is very different from previous techniques where the carbon nanotubes were manipulated after growth.

“With our method, there’s no requirement for expensive instrumentation and no requirement for tedious processes. It’s a one-step process. We call it ’self-aligning growth.’ The carbon nanotubes ‘know’ where to start growth. In previous efforts, they could only manipulate carbon nanotubes one piece at a time, so they had to align the carbon nanotubes one by one. For our approach using optical near-field effects, all locations with sharp tips can accommodate carbon nanotube growth. That means we can make multiple carbon nanotubes at a time and all of them will be self-aligned,” said professor Lu.

Although the researchers didn’t manage to generate millions of self-aligned carbon nanotubes, for the time being this is quite a breakthrough and you will have to take into consideration the fact that this is only the beginning therefore in a few years Lu and his team could develop and commercialize nanoscale devices like bio-sensors, photon-sensors, memory cells, or light-emitters.

“We have shown that we can use optical near-field effects to control growth for a small amount of carbon nanotubes. We want to make this process scalable so it can be used to make large numbers at a time so we can make a circuit or a system by this approach,” concluded professor Lu.

Here is a quick one – it appears that the Kindle 2 is already shipping, but not for everybody. The device has been shipped as of yesterday, however, the official date for shipping was on 24th February. If you ordered a Kindle 2 and you received it, let us now and give us some information!

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CeBIT is coming and it’s looking very promising. The show will be held between March 3rd and 8th in Hanover, Germany (that’s in Europe) and like I said, it will be great like always. Here is the iPoint 3D, a device which gives people the possibility to communicate using only simple finger gestures without even touching it. Pretty great, huh? This 3D display is a (Ce)BIT larger than a regular keyboard (although in the picture looks bigger) and it can be hanged down from the ceiling, but you can always integrate it into a simple coffee table.

The iPoint 3D was developed by scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI, and it’s a recognition device that features two built-in cameras to detect your hands and fingers in real-time, and then send the info to a computer. I repeat that there is no need for a physical contact or other special markers. iPoint 3D will be useful for video gamers, but it can be used in several domains and areas including in a  hospital room.

So we are waiting for CeBIT 2009 to open its doors, and bring you more information about this device!

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