Credit: Tokyo Tech
Oxygen (O2) is an essential gas not only for us and most other lifeforms, but also for many industrial processes, biomedicine, and environmental monitoring applications. Given the importance of O2 and other gases, many researchers have focused on developing and improving gas-sensing technologies. At the frontier of this evolving field lie modern nanogap gas sensors devices usually comprised of a sensing material and two conducting electrodes that are separated by a minuscule gap in the order of nanometers (nm), or thousand millionths of a meter. When molecules of specific gases get inside this gap, they electronically interact with the sensing layer and the electrodes, altering measurable electric properties such as the resistance between the electrodes. In turn, this allows one to indirectly measure the concentration of a given gas.
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(Left) SEM image of the metamaterial absorber developed by KIMM and UNIST. Top view shows cross-shaped antenna. (Center) Side view of the microstructure of the metamaterial absorber. view more
Credit: The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM)
A local research team, comprised of members of the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials(KIMM) under the Ministry of Science and ICT and UNIST, developed a metamaterial absorber that significantly enhances the detection of harmful substances or biomolecules, and published their results in
Small Methods.
The joint research team led by Principal Researcher Dr. Joo-Yun Jung of the Nano-Convergence Mechanical Systems Research Division at KIMM and Professor Jongwon Lee of UNIST developed a metamaterial that enhances infrared absorption spectroscopy through 100-fold amplification of detection signals. The proposed metamaterial is a special functional material with vertical nanogaps of a smaller size than
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology develop a 3D functional interposer the interface between a chip and the package substrate containing an embedded capacitor. This compact design saves a lot of package area and greatly reduces the wiring length between the chip s terminals and the capacitor, allowing for less noise and power consumption. Their approach paves the way to new semiconductor package structures with greater miniaturization.
In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a research team of the Institute of Complex Systems of the UB (UBICS) analysed the time evolution of real complex networks and developed a model in which the emergence of new nodes can be related to pre-existing nodes, similarly to the evolution of species in biology.
Credit: HW University
Energy communities will play a key role in building the more decentralised, less carbon intensive, and fairer energy systems of the future. Such communities enable local prosumers (consumers with own generation and storage) to generate, store and trade energy with each other using locally owned assets, such as wind turbines, rooftop solar panels and batteries. In turn, this enables the community to use more locally generated renewable generation, and shifts the market power from large utility companies to individual prosumers.
Energy community projects often involve jointly-owned assets such as community-owned wind turbines or shared battery storage. Yet, this raises the question of how these assets should be controlled - often in real time, and how the energy outputs jointly-owned assets should be shared fairly among community members, given not all members have the same size, energy needs or demand profiles.