News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

An international team's findings provide important clues for designing polymer solar cells approaching target for power conversion efficiency and optimized for roll-to-roll processing.

As the US' first wind farm is installed in Rhode Island this week, a new study from the University of Delaware shows offshore wind may be even more powerful and turbulent than expected in the Northeast. The findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, could have important implications for the future development of American offshore wind farms -- assessing how much wind power can be produced, what type of turbines to use, how many turbines should be installed and the spacing between them.

The often-maligned E. coli bacteria has powerhouse potential: in the lab, it has the ability to crank out fuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful products at a rapid rate. A team from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis has discovered a new way to remove a major stumbling block in the process, and boost biofuel production from E. coli.

Using a unique combination of advanced computational methods, University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers have demystified some of the complex catalytic chemistry in fuel cells -- an advance that brings cost-effective fuel cells closer to reality.

Moving a nanosatellite around in space takes only a tiny amount of thrust. Engineers from Michigan Technological University and the University of Maryland teamed up, put a nanoscale rocket under a microscope, and watched what happened.

The capacity of lithium-ion batteries might be increased by six times by using anodes made of silicon instead of graphite. A team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin Institute of Soft Matter and Functional Materials has observed for the first time in detail how lithium ions migrate into thin films of silicon. It was shown that extremely thin layers of silicon would be sufficient to achieve the maximal load of lithium. The results are published in the journal ACS Nano.