CHANNELS

Aerospace

Automotive

Automated & Autonomous Vehicles

Battery & Electrification Technology

Defense

Drone TV

Electronics

Manufacturing & Prototyping

Materials

Medical

Motion Control

RF & Microwave Technology

Robotics & Automation

Sensors & IoT

Test & Measurement

Aerospace
Automotive
Automated & Autonomous Vehicles
Battery & Electrification Technology
Defense
Drone TV
Electronics
Manufacturing & Prototyping
Materials
Medical
Motion Control
RF & Microwave Technology
Robotics & Automation
Sensors & IoT
Test & Measurement
Aerospace & Defense
Search Results

Curved Crystals for Advanced Lasers, LEDs, Solar Cells & More

In designs that mimic the texture of starfish shells, engineers from the University of Michigan have made curved ordered crystals. Such shapes are found readily in nature, but not in the lab. Crystals engineers typically make either have facets with flat surfaces and hard angles, or are smooth but lack a repeating molecular order. Both the new shapes and the way the researchers made them have promising applications. They could potentially be useful to guide light in advanced lasers, LEDs, solar cells, sensors, and nonreflective surfaces. A layer might be able to render a material water- or dirt-repellant. They might also be beneficial in 3D-printed pharmaceuticals that absorb more readily into the body.

Topics:
Drug Delivery Electronics & Computers Energy LEDs Lasers & Laser Systems Lighting Manufacturing & Prototyping Materials Medical Photonics Renewable Energy Semiconductors & ICs Sensors Solar Power

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 usually when you grow crystals or crystalline films you would end up with faceted crystals which means they have flat surfaces and angles you would not end with something continuous and smooth and curved so the discovery was made by a mistake we were just printing thin films and we let the system run for a longer time and then we just notic that Beyond certain film thickness we are

    00:00:27 starting to obtain very interesting circular features we thought maybe it was some organism or something that just like got attached to the surface but then we repeated and repeated a couple of times and then we actually saw that we can control what we're growing so we can control the sizes of those features and how fast they can grow so it was obvious it was

    00:00:50 not a mistake that it's much something much bigger than that they called them lobes but because they're on the scale in between tens of nanometers to couple of microns even we call them nonanol opes essentially they look like um kind of like hot air balloons that are raising from a surface but also those molecules inside are ordered so this is really unique and this is something you

    00:01:15 don't see very often those films that they making can be useful for um solar cells for light emitting diodes for various types of sensors and we can do it essentially on any possible substrate it can be metal it can be plastic you can imagine this kind of system can print um solar cells on a glass for instance on a glass that will use as a window if you would call the solar cell

    00:01:42 with a structure like ours this would enable for instance to filter only the wavelength range that you would need for a specific solar cell and that can make solar cells much more efficient because those materials we are working with are similar to what is used in phace iCal industry we are also starting to work on drug sprinting so if you would for instance

    00:02:08 would get a film that has very high surface area it would dissolve in your body much quicker than just a compressed powder tablet it would be a big breakthrough especially with drugs that are hard to absorb so to make the film we essentially heat up um material that's inside this part and we have an inner gas coming through through the nozzle picks up the evaporated material

    00:02:33 and jets it onto the surface this way you can obtain pretty much any desired pattern it can be a film it can be a line can be a DOT whatever shape you define it was quite challenging to build a model that would predict something like this because it's it's kind of combination of material properties and the technique and the deposition properties now we're able also to create

    00:03:01 rods and platelets and all different features growing using this technology we were talking about making a ceramic membrane that will conduct lithium ions at rates that allow us to replace liquids used in lithium ion batteries