Science

Short news science

Light trap
It has long been thought that conversion efficiency of solar cells cannot exceed 34 percent, due to a thermodynamic limit.

In this week’s issue of Nature Materials, Professor Albert Polman, director of the FOM Institute Amolf, and his colleague Professor Harry Atwater, from the California Institute of Technology, describe a method with which they believe it possible to increase the efficiency to up to 70 percent.

doi:10.1038/nmat3263


Tap water

A reliable water supply is important for health care, but hard to define. In search of an assessment method, Dr Nemanja Trifunovic developed a computer programme called Nedra (Network Design and Reliability Assessment). It evaluates network generation, filtering, optimization and cost calculation for simple and large networks.



Nemanja Trifunovic, ‘Pattern recognition for reliability assessment of water distribution networks’, 13 February 2012, PhD supervisor: Prof. Kala Vairavamoorthy (CEGS).


Zebro

The tough, cockroach-like robot that has been developed by Dr Gabriel Lopes (3mE) features on the Dutch robot website www.robot161.nl. The article explains that the six-legged robot called Zebro is based on the American robot RHex, which has been developed for the US Defense research agency Darpa. Lopes worked on RHex at the University of Michigan before coming to Delft in 2000. The weblog features numerous links, some videos and photos.


bit.ly/zebro

www.delta.tudelft.nl/ 23076

No Moore
No Moore

No Moore


Moore’s Law has come to its end by the single-atom transistor that was described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (19 February). Researchers from the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne deposited a single phosphorus atom on a crossing of channels on a silicon substrate. This allows them to apply voltages to the atom and use it as a transistor 0.1 nanometer across (the present industry standard is 32 nanometer). One more point: it only functions at cryonic temperatures.

Editor Redactie

Do you have a question or comment about this article?

delta@tudelft.nl

Comments are closed.