Purdue University
Heat pumps provide heating in winter and cooling in summer. While they’re OK for moderate climates, they are not efficient in extreme cold climates. Building on work that began five years ago, researchers at Purdue University are developing a new type of heat pump that is much more efficient and could allow residents in cold climates to cut their heating bills in half. Read More
Biofuels are seen as a more environmentally friendly fuel source than petroleum-based fuels, but transporting the bulky biomass used to produce them is expensive because of their volume. It’s much more economical to transport the liquid fuel after it has been processed but this isn’t possible if the processing facilities are located far from the source of the biomass. A new method to process agricultural waste and other biomass could enable the creation of mobile processing plants that would rove the Midwest to produce fuels where the biomass is sourced. Read More
Nanowires could be the key to the transistors of tomorrow
Researchers agree that chip manufacturers will soon reach a hard limit in terms of transistor miniaturization, disproving rule-of-thumb predictions that transistor density roughly doubles every 18 to 24 months. But a collaboration between IBM, Purdue University and the University of California in Los Angeles may have found a way to squeeze more transistor in the same area by building them vertically rather than horizontally. Read More
Researchers at Purdue University have reported important progress in developing finFETs, a type of transistor that some say will eventually substitute the silicon-based kind because it allows engineers to push miniaturization even further in the perpetual effort to validate the predictions of Moore's Law. Read More
What, exactly, makes a rocket fuel environmentally friendly?
Automobiles aren’t the only vehicles turning to more environmentally friendly fuel sources. As we reported recently, NASA are testing a new type of rocket propellant made of a mixture of water and “nanoscale aluminum” powder they claim could provide a cleaner way to launch rockets, power long-distance space missions and generate hydrogen for fuel cells. A number of readers wondered, not unreasonably, what qualifies a rocket fuel as eco-friendly. We now have a few more answers. Read More
Researchers at the Honda Research Institute, Purdue University and the University of Louisville have discovered a way to systematically grow carbon nanotubes with either metallic or semiconducting properties, solving a long-standing problem in nanotechnology research and paving the way for the widespread use of nanotubes in electronics. Read More
As an increasing number of hybrid-powered vehicles move from concept to completion, technology is battling to keep pace with some of the less-publicized technical challenges found among the complex electronics aboard these land- and air-based vehicles, computers and other devices. For instance, how do you effectively cool the electronics in a high-power electric motor that propels a passenger car from 0-60mph in under 10 seconds and uses regenerative braking to stop? Researchers in the U.S. believe the secret may lie in understanding precisely how fluid boils in tiny ‘microchannels’, which has led them to develop formulas and models that will help engineers design unique systems to cool high-power electronics found in today’s and tomorrow’s devices. Read More
Researchers at Cornell, Purdue and Norfolk State University have reported the successful creation of a 'spaser', a new kind of nanoscale laser that breaks dimensional limits previously thought to be insurmountable, leading the way to significantly faster and more efficient computer processing and data transfer rates. Read More
We recently looked at a technique that could help extend Moore’s Law by using DNA molecules as scaffolding to pack more power and speed into computer chips. Now researchers from Purdue University and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory are working to achieve the same result by adapting the same methods used in fusion-energy research to create extremely thin plasma beams for a new class of 'nanolithography'. Read More
While it’s true that water and oil don’t mix, water may soon be all a person needs to completely remove any trace of an oil spill - provided the surfaces are coated with newly designed polymer materials that would do away with harsh chemical detergents and solvents. And if you have ever been inconvenienced by fog on your bathroom window, car windshield, or eyeglasses, the same materials can be used as an anti-fog agent with similar eco-friendly benefits. Read More
