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Monday, May 14, 2007

"NANOTECH: Nanomaterials show promise as energy boosters"

Lithium-ion batteries could get a twofold boost in charge storage capacity from a nanotechnology developed at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and announced May 8 at the 211th Meeting of The Electrochemical Society (Chicago). Separately, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, working with their counterparts at Xiamen University in China, have devised a tetrahexahedral (24-facet) nanocrystal that they claim can increase the catalytic activity per unit area in fuel cells as much as fourfold. In April, another group at Georgia Tech announced a nanomaterial to enable three-dimensional solar cells that would capture nearly all the energy from sunlight, rather than reflect part of it. That could boost the efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) systems while simultaneously reducing the systems' size and weight, according to Georgia Tech.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199501841