Nano Engineering

Thermoelectric generators can convert body heat to electrical energy providing a continuous source of energy for low power electronics. Small and lightweight thermoelectric generators can be integrated into wearable devices making battery-less devices a reality. Studies have shown that a large fraction of the users stops using their wearables after a few months partly caused […]

Perhaps the most vibrant areas across the landscape of physics research today lie here in the study of “Quantum Materials”. They are to be the steppingstone toward quantum computing and the frontier of new and exciting physics. But what are the quantum materials and what makes them so special? Recent discoveries of materials in which […]

Energy harvesters that can convert heat to electricity have the potential to revolutionize a broad range of applications by enabling sensors and electronics to live off the harvested energy completely eliminating the need for batteries. Potential applications range from wearable devices for monitoring of human health and environmental conditions to all systems (e.g. commercial refrigerator) [&#82…

Despite the many advantages of laser ablation, typical PLD suffers from ejection of micro scale particulates (or droplets) during the target ablation process. The deposition of such particulates is usually undesired in many applications as they can deteriorate the electrical, chemical, optical, and mechanical properties of the film. It is possible to reduce the density […]

During the last decade, significant progress was made in fundamental understanding of mechanisms that led to thermoelectric materials with high figure-of-merit ZT (Figure 1).  It was proposed and subsequently demonstrated that nanostructuring of the semiconductor material could provide a significant improvement. The technique was implemented in different forms including bulk nanocomposites,[i],[i…

Electric fields are known to have sometimes profound, and often non-linear, influences on the chemistry and microstructure evolution of solid-state materials and can be utilized to enhance processing kinetics and/or lead to highly non-equilibrium structures. While the interaction of electric fields with material kinetic processes has been of interest for many decades, there remain multiple [&#823…

Nanocomposites comprise of nanocrystals of different phases or composition, where crystallites and interfacial nanostructures form a disordered morphology. An interesting feature of these materials is that the energy disruption for both electrons and phonons can happen in a time scale that is smaller or comparable to the energy relaxation time. Therefore, the charge and energy […]

In a multi component nanocrystalline material, crystallites and interfacial nanostructures form a disordered morphology. In such a disordered nanostructured material, the energy disruption for both electrons and phonons can happen in a time scale that is smaller or comparable to the energy relaxation time. Therefore, the charge and heat carriers can maintain an energetically non-equilibrium [&#82…

Coherent Potential Approximation (CPA) There is currently no quantum mechanical transport model for charge (or phonon) transport in multiphase nanocrystalline structures. Due to absence of periodicity, one cannot apply any of the elegant theorems, such as Bloch’s theorem, which are implicit in the basic theory of crystalline solids. Atomistic models such as Kubo and NEGF may […]

The market for hydrogen is vast consisting of recent demand for renewable energies and industrial and chemical processes needs such as methanol production, ammonia (NH3), removing sulfur from gasoline, float glass production, edible fat hydrogenation, weather balloons, rockets, etc. Today hydrogen is predominately generated as a by-product of the release of CO2 in the processing […]