Engineers work to create new biomaterials with energy technology applications
When automotive engineers want to create a new car, they don’t build thousands of prototypes. Instead, they create computer models and run simulations for performance, efficiency and desirability before a model is selected for fabrication.
University of Delaware materials science professors Darrin Pochan and Kristi Kiick are taking a similar approach to building new nanomaterials from biomolecules — namely peptides and proteins — that could increase the efficiency of photovoltaics, also known as solar cells, and other electronic devices. (more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists develop a new nanotech tool to probe solar-energy conversion
If nanoscience were television, we’d be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light—the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color—is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers.
But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible. The team developed their tool to investigate solar-to-electric energy conversion at its most fundamental level, but their invention promises to reveal new worlds of data to researchers in all walks of nanoscience. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Finding that Protein Folding Funnels Also Apply to Self-Assembly Should Benefit Biomimicry and Nanosynthesis
Proteins are able to self-assemble into a wide range of highly ordered structures that feature a diverse array of properties. Through biomimicry – technological innovation inspired by nature – humans hope to emulate proteins and produce our own version of self-assembling molecules. A key to accomplishing this is understanding how protein-folding – a process critical to the form and function of a protein – is extended from individual proteins to complex assemblies.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have now shown that a concept widely accepted as describing the folding of a single individual protein is also applicable to the self-assembly of multiple proteins. Their findings provide important guidelines for future biomimicry efforts, particularly for device fabrication and nanoscale synthesis. (more…)
An industry leader in silicon photonics and large-scale photonic-electronic integration, Hochberg is renowned for establishing Optoelectronic Systems Integration in Silicon (OpSIS), a high-tech foundry service for silicon photonics in which the community shares the cost of fabricating complex chip-scale systems across many projects. (more…)
