News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Many wearable biosensors, data transmitters and similar tech advances for personalized health monitoring have now been 'creatively miniaturized,' says materials chemist Trisha Andrew at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but they require a lot of energy, and power sources can be bulky and heavy. Now she and her Ph.D. student Linden Allison report that they have developed a fabric that can harvest body heat to power small wearable microelectronics such as activity trackers.

The Polymerisation Process research group of the POLYMAT institute of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country has managed to efficiently encapsulate semiconductor nanocrystals or quantum dots of various sizes into polymer particles; great stability in terms of their optical properties and good fluorescence control when combining different quantum dots have been achieved. The possible applicability of these materials as sensors of volatile organic compounds has also been explored.

A recent study, affiliated with South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has presented a new class of solar cells, using lead-free perovskite materials.

For the first time, researchers performed logic operations -- the basis of computation -- with a chemical device using electric fields and ultraviolet light. The device and the pioneering methods used open up research possibilities including low-power, high-performance computer chips.

Organic polymers can nowadays be found in solar cells, sensors, LEDs and in many other technical applications. One specific type of polymers - known as S-PPVs - were previously regarded as promising in theory but were almost impossible to produce from a technical perspective. After many years of work, a team from TU Wien has now managed to identify a new chemical synthesis process for the production of S-PPVs.

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a simple new tweak that could double the efficiency of organic electronics. OLED-displays, plastic-based solar cells and bioelectronics are just some of the technologies that could benefit from their new discovery, which deals with 'double-doped' polymers.