Administrator

Pinshane Y. Huang, Racheff Faculty Scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will give the talk “Building a new era of atom-by-atom materials characterization with electron ptychography” at 3:05 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, in 10 Sparks Building on the University Park campus.

A new approach to plastic recycling being explored at Penn State could make the process more efficient by using tiny particles of coal, according to researchers. On the latest episode of “Growing Impact,” researchers discussed how the technique uses laser light to generate heat at the molecular scale, potentially allowing plastics to be broken down into their basic building blocks and reused.

Researchers have developed solar cells that function underwater even when submerged to a depth of 10 m and that produce enough power to charge lithium-ion batteries. Such devices could be used to power submerged sensors, cameras, and communication systems. Water dulls the intensity of sunlight even over short distances. To make light-harvesting devices that work underwater, the researchers tuned the electronic properties of perovskite solar cells, endowing them with wider-than-usual band gaps.