Energy & Green Tech
As we move away from fossil fuels and shift to renewable energy to tackle climate change, the need for new ways to capture and store energy becomes increasingly important.
Dec 2, 2020
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Energy & Green Tech
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report a breakthrough in developing a next-generation thermochromic window that not only reduces the need for air conditioning but ...
Oct 19, 2020
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50
Energy & Green Tech
The diamonds and other crystals on view in science museum exhibits are a delight to the eye. What contributes to their sometimes dazzling geometric shapes and colors is their highly ordered arrangement of atoms. For the crystalline ...
May 4, 2020
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172
Engineering
Researchers in Korea have found an effective and inexpensive strategy to transform solar cells from opaque to transparent. Existing transparent solar cells tend to have a reddish hue and lower efficiency, but by punching ...
Dec 11, 2019
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42
Energy & Green Tech
The rows of blue solar panels that dot landscapes and rooftops are typically made out of crystalline silicon, the workhorse semiconductor found in virtually every electronic device.
May 23, 2019
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851
Energy & Green Tech
How can we store solar energy for period when the sun doesn't shine? One solution is to convert it into hydrogen through water electrolysis. The idea is to use the electrical current produced by a solar panel to 'split' water ...
Aug 25, 2016
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3165
Energy & Green Tech
Lithium-ion batteries powered the device on which these words appear. From phones and laptops to electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries are critical to the technology of the modern world—but they can also explode. Comprising ...
Nov 3, 2023
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19
Energy & Green Tech
Fluorine can be a beneficial ingredient in medicines because of its excellent pharmacological properties, according to Phillip Milner, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences ...
Oct 11, 2023
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Energy & Green Tech
Crystalline silicon solar cells dominate the global photovoltaic market with module efficiencies of around 20-22%. However, the field of solar energy is wanting for innovative materials and approaches that yield even higher ...
Apr 13, 2023
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Hardware
Developing energy efficient high performing computing devices (i.e., devices that not only consume little power, but also compute information rapidly) is a key goal of edge computing research. Combining the memory components ...
Jan 30, 2023
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Crystallinity refers to the degree of structural order in a solid. In a crystal, the atoms or molecules are arranged in a regular, periodic manner. The degree of crystallinity has a big influence on hardness, density, transparency and diffusion. In a gas, the relative positions of the atoms or molecules are completely random. Amorphous materials, such as liquids and glasses, represent an intermediate case, having order over short distances (a few atomic or molecular spacings) but not over longer distances.
Many materials (such as glass-ceramics and some polymers), can be prepared in such a way as to produce a mixture of crystalline and amorphous regions. In such cases, crystallinity is usually specified as a percentage of the volume of the material that is crystalline. Even within materials that are completely crystalline, however, the degree of structural perfection can vary. For instance, most metallic alloys are crystalline, but they usually comprise many independent crystalline regions (grains or crystallites) in various orientations separated by grain boundaries; furthermore, they contain other defects (notably dislocations) that reduce the degree of structural perfection. The most highly perfect crystals are silicon boules produced for semiconductor electronics; these are large single crystals (so they have no grain boundaries), are nearly free of dislocations, and have precisely controlled concentrations of defect atoms.
Crystallinity can be measured using x-ray diffraction, but calorimetric techniques are also commonly used.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
