#mit

#mit

This Material Can Turn Any Surface Into A Power Source The bonus is, the material is so light and thin you wouldn’t really expect its complexity! Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly turn any surface into a power source.The team, led by Vladimir Bulović, the leader of the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory (ONE Lab), and director of MIT.nano, published their results in Small Methods. Bulovic was joined by Mayuran Saravanapavanantham, an electrical engineering, and computer science graduate student at MIT; and Jeremiah Mwaura, a research scientist in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics.The new cells are durable and flexible. They are also thinner than a human hair. They are easy to use, as they are glued to a lightweight fabric that allows installation on a fixed surface. They can generate 18 times more power per kilogram than conventional heavy solar panels.Created from semiconducting inks, what makes these power cells unique, aside from their thinness, is that you can integrate them to any surface, and they will be able to provide power. The material can be attached to the sails of the boat, tents, tarps, and even drones. “The lightweight solar fabrics enable integrability, providing impetus for the current work. We strive to accelerate solar adoption, given the present urgent need to deploy new carbon-free sources of energy,” Bulović said. Image credit: Melanie Gonick, MIT#power #sources #solarpower #MIT #research #solarcells

This New Battery Is Made From Low-Cost Materials Will this new battery be the next cheap alternative for limited power sources in a container?Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new battery from inexpensive materials that are very much available in big amounts in the world. This project was done to provide an alternative option to lithium-ion batteries, which are too expensive for operations and other processes.The new battery architecture uses aluminum, sulfur, and a molten salt electrolyte to provide power to machines and systems. The researchers used aluminum and sulfur as the electrode materials for the battery in charge of providing electrons to the external circuit. Researchers picked aluminum for being the second most abundant metal in the market, as it has the right electrochemical properties for an efficient battery. The dominant one, iron, did not fit what the experts wanted for their battery.Sulfur became the second electrode material because of its accessibility and cheap market price. The salt electrolyte was chosen because the team didn’t want to use volatile, flammable organic liquids. This is because they can lead to fires in cars and other technologies that need a battery.The study was done by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Image credit: Rebecca Miller#MIT #research #development #battery #aluminum #sulfur #alternatives #energy #power #science

AI-Powered Simulations Let Robot Cheetah Teach Itself How to Run Faster Than EverA robot developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has successfully broken the record for the fastest run ever recorded.The unique aspect about this android cheetah was that it wasn’t programmed to run at an incredible speed, it was tasked to figure out how to run that fast through trial and error. Usually, programming machines involve humans doing all the work. Humans typically install precise instructions on what to do and how to do it. According to Gabriel Margolis and Ge Yang, the problem with this approach is that it isn’t scalable. A huge chunk of time is needed to manually program a robot to operate in many different environments. The robot cheetah is a manifestation of experts attempting to create a robot that functions through a learn-by-experience model. Through the project, the robot was able to hit a top speed of 3.9 meters per second, or roughly 8.7 mph, when sprinting. Check out MIT’s video on the project and its results below. image credit: MIT #robotics #MIT #research #AI #reinforcementmodel #programming 

"Acoustic Fabric" Converts Sound into Electrical SignalsEngineers from MIT worked with people from the Rhode Island School of Design to create a fabric that can capture sound and turn it into electric signals. The item, called an “acoustic fabric,” works like a microphone. The resulting cloth, aside from being able to detect and convert sounds, is soft, durable, and comfortable.This special cloth was developed from a flexible fiber, a “piezoelectric” material that produces an electrical signal when bent or mechanically deformed. The special trait of this material enables the fabric to convert sound vibrations into electrical signals. According to Wei Yan, the lead author of the study, their invention has a lot of potential uses. “Wearing an acoustic garment, you might talk through it to answer phone calls and communicate with others,” says Yan, who is now an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “In addition, this fabric can imperceptibly interface with the human skin, enabling wearers to monitor their heart and respiratory condition in a comfortable, continuous, real-time, and long-term manner.”Image credit: Greg Hren #acousticfabric #research #MIT #RhodeIslandSchoolofDesign #clothing #sounds

MIT Researchers Developed a $4 Solar-Powered Desalination System out of Everyday MaterialsA team of researchers at MIT and in China developed a desalination system that is more efficient and less expensive than previously established methods. The hope is that it will help solve shortages of water in different areas of the globe. The researchers focused on creating a design that also deals with the accumulation of salt over time. “The challenge has been the salt fouling issue, that people haven’t really addressed. So, we see these very attractive performance numbers, but they’re often limited because of longevity. Over time, things will foul,” Evelyn Wang, one of the researchers in the study, said. The resulting apparatus is a layered system. A dark material is at the top to absorb the sun’s heat, and a thin layer of water above a perforated layer of material sits atop the designated container of the salty water. The perforated material, made of polyurethane, has holes that are 2.5 millimeters in diameter, which is what the researchers deemed to be the optimal size that allows for a natural convective circulation between the warmer upper layer of water and the colder reservoir below. This prevents the salt from accumulating. Further work and testing would be required to test the device in large settings and long runs, according to Hadi Ghasemi, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Houston.Image credit: Wang, et.al via MIT News #desalination #system #MIT #China

MIT Chemical Engineers Created New Kind of Plastic That's Twice as Strong as SteelChemical engineers from MIT produced a new material that is tougher than steel and as light as plastic. It can also be easily manufactured in bulk.“We don’t usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things, it has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that,” says Michael Strano, senior author of the new study.In the research, Strano and his colleagues devised a new polymerization process that permitted them to create a two-dimensional sheet of polyaramide — something that scientists in the past had tried to make for decades and thus concluded wrongly that such a structure was impossible to create. They used melamine as monomer building blocks. Under the right conditions, these monomers grew in two dimensional-sheets and formed disks which make the structure very strong.The MIT researchers proceeded to coat surfaces with films of the new material, which they called 2DPA-1. They found 2DPA-1 to be four to six times harder to be deformed (elastic modulus) than bulletproof glass. It is also twice as hard to break (yield strength) than steel — while having only one-sixth the density of the latter. The material is also impermeable to gases. “This could allow us to create ultrathin coatings that can completely prevent water or gases from getting through. This kind of barrier coating could be used to protect metal in cars and other vehicles, or steel structures,” Strano says.The Center for Enhanced Nanofluidic Transport (CENT) funded this research.Image credit: polymer film courtesy of the researchers; Christine Daniloff, MIT#research #plastic #engineering #MIT #newmaterial #steel