Congratulations to MolES faculty Lilo Pozzo’s senior design team “Polydrop,” grand prize winners at the 2013 UW Environmental Innovation Challenge, an annual event sponsored by the UW’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship. Their prize-winning prototype is an additive that transforms regular coatings into conductive coatings to enable the use of carbon fiber composites in the transportation industry, a solution that prevents the accumulation of static charges that can interfere with sensitive electronics. Learn more "º Read More
Guest post by MolES faculty member and Chemical Engineering chair Daniel Schwartz on the Foster Unplugged blog
When I think Cleantech, my mind goes straight to the triangular logo on my waste container at work: "reduce, reuse, recycle." These three words are central to most enduring cleantech innovations, though sometimes in paradoxical ways. "Reduce" is the most prone to paradox, since reducing one thing generally happens by increasing another. Let's explore this "reduce" paradox via two well-known examples in that space.
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A paper in Science describes an organic crystal that shows promise as a cheap, flexible, nontoxic material for the working parts of memory chips, sensors and energy-harvesting devices.
The U.S. Department of Energy this month awarded $4 million to a team, led by UW chemical engineers, that aims to develop bacteria to turn the methane in natural gas into diesel fuel for transportation.
A diverse group of UW collaborators seeking to determine whether solar cells from earth-abundant elements can be a sustainable, environmentally low-impact, and profitable form of electricity production were awarded an Sustainable Energy Pathways grant from the National Science Foundation this fall. Led by Rehnberg Chair Professor Hugh Hillhouse the team, which includes Christine Luscombe (MolES/Materials Science & Engineering), Daniel Gamelin (MolES/Chemistry), Alison Cullen (Evans School of Public Affairs), and Xiaodong Xu (Materials Science & Engineering), will explore the use of nanocrystal and molecular inks to develop low-cost, high-efficiency solar cells with a benign environmental impact.