Virginia Tech

Hyundai Heavy to build Korea's largest solar cell factory

Hyundai Heavy teams up with France's Saint-Gobain to build Korea's largest thin-film solar cell factory. Hyundai Heavy held a signing ceremony for the construction contract on October 8 in Paris. The ceremony was attended by Hyundai Heavy Chairman & CEO Min Keh-sik and Saint-Gobain Chairman Pierre-Andre de Chalendar.

Printed electronics killer applications

Printed and partly printed electronics and electrics are not being applied to very expensive things or electronic things first. It is more about modernising printing more than it is about modernising electronics.

New electric planes take off

It seems back to front but the unmanned pure electric aircraft have often been huge, including the AeroVironment and Aurora Flight Sciences vehicles that cruise to upper atmosphere on solar energy carrying out surveillance.

Many ways to harvest energy from shock absorbers

In the new age of the electric vehicle, almost everything has to be rethought.

The exit from China

2010 is turning out to be the year of the great exodus from China.

New way to make energy harvesting nanowires

Researchers Florian Mumm and Pawel Sikorski at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim think the shimmering sea mouse may hold a key to a new way of creating nanoscale electronics.

The future of electric aircraft

It can only fly for 15 minutes but it is a breakthrough all the same. Improved batteries have finally made a manned electric helicopter a reality.

Real Time Locating and Wireless Sensor Networks - Rapid Advances

In the past, too much use of RFID has involved sensing items and conveyances only when they pass very near to the occasional interrogator. Heroic assumptions are then made about what happened in between. Was it destroyed, perhaps by overheating? Is it still there? Is it intact?

Car that uses solar and piezoelectric energy

Davind Seesing has created a vehicle that uses double glazing as a conduit to allow air to flow through to generate and store energy in the vehicle.

Miniature energy harvesting technologies

Dr. Shi's work focuses on miniature energy harvesting technologies that could potentially power wireless electronics, portable devices, stretchable electronics, and implantable biosensors.

Piezoelectric fabric that can detect and produce sound

For the past decade, Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT's Research Lab of Electronics, has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.

BAE Systems gains Military EV business

In March 2010, BAE Systems has received a contract to develop an onboard vehicle power management system designed to improve U.S. Marine Corps mission effectiveness by significantly increasing electric power available to ground forces.

Amazon rainforest, electro-active papers using piezoelectric cellulose

The biggest challenge of the XXI Century is probably the sustainable use of biomass. In this sense, Amazon Rainforest appears as a great source of technological possibilities, especially in Materials Science, where this reality is very clear due, mainly, to the various Cellulose applications.

US truck, bus, military EV producers get active

manufacturing plant will produce 2,500 electric buses a year, and employ around 1,300 workers over the next five years

Piezo and pyroelectric energy sources

At the recent IDTechEx Energy Harvesting and Storage Europe conference in Munich, Dr. Nantakan MUENSIT, associate professor at the Material Physics Laboratory, Department of Physics, Prince of Songkla University (PSU), Hat Yai, Thailand spoke on "Applications of Piezoelectric and Pyroelectric Materials as Microsources of Energy".

Wind energy harvester from Humdinger

IDTechEx met with Humdinger last week in Hong Kong, a start-up company of six people that has developed a completely new approach to wind energy harvesters.

Summary from Virginia Tech's Annual Energy Harvesting Workshop

About 90 people from seven countries attended this fifth annual energy harvesting workshop in Roanoke, VA, USA, which serves as an excellent platform to air the latest technical progress with energy harvesters.

Energy Harvesting and WSN & RTLS Award Winners Announced

This week the IDTechEx events Energy Harvesting & Storage and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) & RTLS took place in Denver, CO, USA. The event was attended by more than 290 attendees, with a brilliantly diverse spread of those through the value chain - from component suppliers to solution providers to many end users from different industries.

Printed Electronics uses more inorganics and composites

Printed electronics is using more inorganics and composites in the quest for higher performance, lower costs, finer feature size, stretchability and creation of radically new components such as memristors, supercabatteries and metamaterials.

INFINERGY™ micro power module wins two industry awards

Infinite Power Solutions, Inc. (IPS), a maker of innovative solid-state, rechargeable, thin-film micro-energy storage devices, has announced that it has received two prestigious industry awards for its Micro Power Module (MPM) solution—Sensors Magazine's "Best of Sensors Expo 2009" silver award and the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting Award for "Best Technology Development."