You are browsing the archives of 2010 January.

It’s worth noting the ARPA-E has a big shindig coming March 1-3 in Washington, DC. Billed as the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, the event sounds like it’s something of a coming out party for ARPA-E in the sense that it is clearly being designed to leave an imprint on not only the R&D community but also on the media and policy makers.

One component is a big “hey, look at what we are already working on,” type of program. On March 1, there will be a pre-summit “Transformative Technology Showcase” that I think has been described as poster session featuring projects ARPA-E is already backing.

Another pre-summit event is a “Partner with ARPA-E” workshop where participants can meet ARPA-E’s Program Directors, discuss the goals and directions for ARPA-E’s program areas.

The main summit has a lot of big name speakers, including Jeffrey Immelt (GE), Desh Deshpande (Sycamore Networks), Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), James Woolsey (ex-CIA director, now with Vantage Point Venture Partners and pundit Tom Friedman (expert at jumping on whatever the latest bandwagon is, but fashionably late).

Overall, it’s a good thing ARPA-E is doing this, especially for the public. The project is flying under the radar of 99.9% of population. There are some really interesting things they are working on that can and will be exciting once there is some publicity about, and hopefully some of this could eventual translate into expanded STEM education interest and programming.

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DuPont expects overall sales of its PV products to exceed $1 billion by 2012.

DuPont announced an investment of $175 million to complete the multi-phase expansion of its high-performance Tedlar PV2001 series oriented film production line. This investment is in addition to $120 million in capacity expansions, announced in August 2009, for raw materials used to make the film, bringing the total commitment of these two phases to $295 million. Tedlar films serve as the critical component of photovoltaic backsheets, providing long-term durability and performance for photovoltaic modules in all-weather conditions.  

The film line expansion will be located at the DuPont Circleville (Ohio) facility using existing and retrofitted assets. This expansion provides Tedlar-oriented film capacity to support global demand of over 10 gigawatts of photovoltaic module production.

“The photovoltaic market increasingly demands materials that enable modules to reliably deliver power for decades,” said David B. Miller, president of DuPont Electronics & Communications. “This major expansion underscores our commitment to maintaining DuPont leadership in the photovoltaic industry and specifically in the backsheet materials market for solar panels.”

The manufacturing steps for Tedlar film include producing vinyl fluoride monomer, which is converted into polyvinyl fluoride polymer resins, and extruded into the film. DuPont plans to increase monomer and polymer resin capacity by more than 50 percent. Construction is under way for these new monomer and resin facilities at the DuPont Louisville, Ky., and Fayetteville, N.C., sites, respectively, and the facilities are scheduled to start up in mid-2010.

DuPont anticipates that the photovoltaic market will grow rapidly over the next several years, and this growth will drive the demand for Tedlar and other new materials that increase the lifetime and efficiency of solar cells and modules. DuPont expects that overall sales of its family of products into the photovoltaic industry will exceed $1 billion by 2012.

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David Danielson

David Danielson, one of the project directors of DOE’ relatively new $400 million ARPA-E program gave today’s keynote presentation at the ACerS’ Electronic Materials and Applications conference. Danielson has a good reputation in the world of materials and venture funding, and his message was that like DARPA, its DoD counterpart, it is indeed interested in high-risk, high-reward projects, but with a strong bias toward funding efforts that can reasonably be seen as getting closer to the marketplace. In other words, they won’t be funding basic science, but if you have better piezo mousetrap, they might be interested in talking to you.

Moreover Danielson’s message is that there are plenty of opportunities for ceramists and materials scientists and engineers in general. He made a point of emphasizing that the opportunities are in funding, but also in employment: ARPA-E is still ramping up its staffing and is looking for program directors and fellows.

He says that ARPA-E is already funding many materials-oriented efforts, including ones involving planar sodium batteries, vertically aligned carbon nanotube-based ultracapacitors, CNT membranes for CO2 capture, GaN-on-SI electronics for electric vehicles, direct growth of monocrystalline equivalents and new magnetic materials 75% less rare earth elements but have twice the energy density.

Danielson also talks about specific game-changers in electronic ceramics. Besides (grid-scale) Na batteries mentioned above, he specifically mentioned solid-state capacitors, ceramic electrolytes in lithium batteries, high-energy battery cathodes, grain boundary-engineered (i.e., ‘virtual single crystals”) thin film for photovoltaic applications, high-temp superconductors and low-cost methods for growing single-crystal Si wafers and ZnO, GaN crystals for LEDs.

Danielson is also promoting participating in ARPA-E via attending their workshops and helping to develop programing and serving as a reviewer of proposals.

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In this struggling economy, businesses as well as the general populace are all struggling to do more with less. In the case of LED and nanotechnology, however, that may not be necessarily a bad thing.

Take for example the work showcased by Nanosys, a company that has developed a method to add nanomaterials to blue LEDs that improves the appearance of LED lighting. Their efforts have created an LED light that combines the energy efficiency of a blue LED with a nanotechnology layer that alters its blue appearance into a warm white light that is better than standard LED lighting.

The benefits of the added nano material not only means improving the quality of the emitted light for backlit LED displays, but doing so while still maintaining a low power profile. Plus Nanosys claims, the process can be added to a company’s assembly line for electronic products without the need for major retooling.

So expect to see better looking LED lighting in the near future as Nanosys nanotechnology starts to appear in televisions and other lighting products beginning later this year.

Read more at Treehugger.

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The Daily Northwestern reported that Northwestern University received $2.4 million in government funding to develop flash-memory devices with enhanced capacity for U.S. military and intelligence use.

Allocated to NU’s Center for Integrated Nanosystems and International Institute for Nanotechnology, the money represents “substantial and welcome funding” for the field of nanoelectronics, says Fraser Stoddart, CINS director and NU Board of Trustees professor of chemistry.

The funding is part of $45.4 million for Illinois-based projects approved by Congress on Dec. 19 in a 2010 defense spending bill, according to the a news release on Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Il) web site.

Developing memory chips will involve building and mounting mechanical switches into infinitely stretching three-dimensional scaffolds on the molecular level, he said.

“Over 10 years ago, we developed two-dimensional switches, and this piece of research will put what we did with two into three (dimensions),” Stoddart continues. “If we managed to do this, it would create very dense flash memory.”

Although funded by the Defense Department, the technology will not be limited to surveillance and battlefield operations but could be used to increase the capacity of any flash memory device, he said.

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