UK universities will be trialling high-resolution pollution monitoring system in cities across the country this summer. The idea is to provide real-time pollutant concentration maps, for which the project has developed three separate sensing devices.
mPhase Technologies, which is commercialising a new battery technology based on electrowetting, has made a video demonstrating that a liquid electrolyte can be controlled on a man made surface.
Nanocrystalline get their behaviour not only from the materials they are made from, but their size and shape. Hence their opto-electronic properties can be tuned by making the crystals bigger or smaller.
Detrimental voids have been discovered in Pb-free solder joints, according to a University of Leicester researcher. Post-graduate Sergey Belyakov, is taking a deep look at Pb-free soldering for the University's materials research group.
Graphene could out-perform copper as on-chip interconnects, claims the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The University of Durham has produced an all-organic memory-transistor. "It is an evolution of silicon flash memory," Professor Mike Petty told Electronics Weekly. "Our step has been making both the semiconductor and the insulator organic."
"We've developed a mechanism for digital memory storage that consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube," said project leader Alex Zettl.
Micro-miniature current generators are the subject of research being carried out at the University of Liverpool in partnership with a university in China
"This is an exciting discovery because it means we may one day be able to tailor-make a material from the bottom up, starting with the microstructure, so it ticks all the boxes required to run a magnetic fridge," says Professor Lesley Cohen.
It is anticipated that the research could one day lead to laser diode-based optical communictaions systems capable of supporting internet access technology with speeds up to 10Gbit/s
