Welding, printing, crushing concrete—an Empa team monitors noisy processes with the help of artificial intelligence. This way you can literally hear production errors and imminent accidents. Kilian Wasmer from the Empa lab for Advanced Materials Processing in Thun keeps shaking his head while speaking, as if he can’t believe the success story himself. Together with […]
The Stacked Color Sensor
The human eye has three different types of sensory cells for the perception of colour: cells that are respectively sensitive to red, green and blue alternate in the eye and combine their information to create an overall coloured image. Image sensors, for example in mobile phone cameras, work in a similar way: blue, green and […]
Batteries Of The Future: Low-Cost Battery From Waste Graphite
Lithium ion batteries are flammable and the price of the raw material is rising. Are there alternatives? Yes: Empa and ETH Zürich researchers have discovered promising approaches as to how we might produce batteries out waste graphite and scrap metal. Kostiantyn Kravchyk works in the group of Maksym Kovalenko. This research group is based at […]
Low-Cost Battery From Waste Graphite
Kostiantyn Kravchyk works in the group of Maksym Kovalenko. This research group is based at both ETH Zurich and in Empa’s Laboratory for Thin Films and Photovoltaics. The two researchers’ ambitious goal at the Empa branch is to make a battery out of the most common elements in the Earth’s crust – such as magnesium […]
How Protons Move Through A Fuel Cell
As charge carriers, electrons and ions play the leading role in electrochemical energy storage devices and converters such as batteries and fuel cells. Proton conductivity is crucial for the latter; protons, i.e. positively charged hydrogen ions, are formed from hydrogen, which is used to power the fuel cell. Empa physicist Artur Braun and Qianli Chen, […]
Coupling Efficient Vehicles with Renewable Energy
Newly registered private cars must meet certain defined CO2 emission standards, and these are expected to be made more stringent in the forthcoming revision of the national regulations, in parallel with similar EU legislation. Empa, PSI and BFH have taken this opportunity to recommend an additional measure to increase the effectiveness of the new standards. […]
Graphene Nanoribbons: It’s All About the Edges
As reported by the journal Nature in its latest issue, researchers from Empa, the Max Planck Institute in Mainz and the Technical University of Dresden have for the first time succeeded in producing graphene nanoribbons with perfect zigzag edges from molecules. Electrons on these zigzag edges exhibit different (and coupled) rotational directions (“spin”). This could […]
Tech Breakthrough for Cheaper Lighting and Flexible Solar Cells
In November 2012, the TREASORES project (Transparent Electrodes for Large Area Large Scale Production of Organic Optoelectronic Devices) started with the aim of developing technologies to dramatically reduce the production costs of organic electronic devices such as solar cells and LED lighting panels. Funded with 9 million Euro from the European Commission and an additional […]
Jet Engines to Become Cleaner in Future
Thanks to a close collaboration between the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa), SR Technics and the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA), Switzerland is setting an international benchmark by developing a method for measuring emissions of fine particulate matter from aircraft engines. The Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection of the International […]
Incorrect Battery Handling Triggers Explosion
The major fire in Steckborn on December 21, 2015, was probably started by a lithium polymer battery in a model car, as the Thurgau cantonal police department recently announced. Battery experts from Empa have already conducted overcharging experiments on such batteries and provide tips on how to handle them safely. Lithium polymer batteries (or LiPo […]