Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is the technique behind a variety of applications, such as medical imaging, neuroscience or detection of drugs and explosives. With the help of quantum sensors, NMR has been adapted to work in the nanoscale regime, where it has both the potential to impact many disciplines, such as life sciences, biology, medicine, […]
A Control System to Improve the Efficiency of Wave Energy Converters
Interest in wave energy has been growing in recent years, and electric generators specially designed to generate electricity from this renewable energy source are being developed. The UPV/EHU’s Advanced Control Group (GCA) has come up with a robust control system for these generators which, during the tests conducted, has been shown to substantially improve their […]
Wave Energy Converters Are Not Geared Toward The Increase In Energy Over The Last Century
The UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country has been exploring how ocean energy has evolved in Ireland during the 20th century to determine how the converters would need to be adapted. Wave energy converters are designed to generate the maximum energy possible in their location and take a typical year in the location as a reference. Alongside the […]
Deep-Learning System Generates Specific Genre-Based Music
Izaro Goienetxea, a UPV/EHU researcher, has developed a method for automatically generating new tunes on the basis of a collection or corpus comprising tunes used in bertso—a form of extempore, sung, Basque verse-making. She has also presented a new way of representing pieces of music, and developed a new method for automatically classifying music. PLOS ONE has […]
The Wave Power Farm Off Mutriku Could Improve Its Efficiency
The offshore power plant or wave farm at Mutriku is the only commercial facility (it is not a prototype) in the world that operates by regularly feeding the grid with electrical power produced by waves. It has been operating since 2011 and the study by the UPV/EHU’s EOLO group analysed its behaviour during the 2014-2016 […]
Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings Remain A Difficult Challenge For Southern Europe
In coming years, there is a legal commitment for all the countries of Europe to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, which boils down to constructing nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEBs), buildings that consume the minimum energy. The EU Directive 31/2010 establishes two key deadlines: All public buildings must be nZEBs from 1 January, 2019, and […]
Electronic Control to Ensure Photovoltaic Systems Always Work at Maximum Power
After having developed various algorithms and control systems and having applied them in a whole range of fields, such as robotics, control of motors in electric machines, and in wind generators, the UPV/EHU’s Advanced Control Group has proven that one of the methods, a sliding mode controller, offers good results in the control of photovoltaic […]
Social Networks Enable Smart Household Appliances to Make Better Recommendations
The thesis entitled Computational intelligent methods for trusting in social networks, produced by the computer engineer David Núñez in the Computational Intelligence Group at the UPV/EHU’s Faculty of Computing, falls within the framework of the European research project Social and Smart (SandS). A part of the project is focussing its attention on user interaction with […]
New Fluorescent Nanomaterials Whose Inspiration Was Taken From Plant Antenna Systems
These new multifunctional materials aim to imitate the photosynthetic organisms of plants. These microorganisms consist of thousands of chlorophyll molecules embedded in a protein matrix, which provides them with a specific orientation/arrangement and intermolecular distance. One of the main characteristics of these systems is their antenna function, which enables them to harvest solar energy in […]
New Step Towards Using Graphene in Electronics
A team of the University of Berkeley and the Centre for Materials Physics (CSIC-UPV/EHU) has managed, with atomic precision, to create nanostructures combining graphene ribbons of varying widths. The work is being published in the prestigious journal Nature Nanotechnology. Few materials have received as much attention from the scientific world or have raised so many […]