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nanotimes News in Brief

10-07/08 :: July/August 2010

Tech Transfer // Berkeley Lab Wins Four 2010 R&D 100 Awards

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our inventions from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Labora-

tory have been recognized with the R&D 100 award for 2010 from R&D Magazine.

The 2010 awardees are:

1. Berkeley Lab scientists Evan Mills and Rich Brown developed the Home Energy Saver, a free online tool that helps consumers identify the best, most cost-effective ways to save energy and reduce green- house gas emissions from their homes. http://hes.lbl.gov

2. Berkeley Lab scientists Peidong Yang, Allon Hoch- baum, Renkun Chen, Raul Diaz Delgado and Arun Majumdar (while still at Berkeley Lab, before his appointment as U.S. DOE’s ARPA-E Director in Oc- tober 2009) manipulated silicon to make nanowires of about 50 to 100nm in diameter, and by switching to a far less expensive manufacturing process, hap- pened to create a surface with an abundance of defects. This transformational new material, Rough Silicon Nanowires, has a rough surface that impedes phonons, the particles that transport heat, yet allows the free movement of electrons, which carry the electric charge. In this way, the scientists transformed

silicon from a bad to a good thermoelectric, marking perhaps the most important discovery in thermoe- lectricity in recent times.

The material developed at Berkeley Lab offers gre- ater stability and lower material and manufacturing costs than other thermoelectrics. Because of its low cost, it is the only existing material suited to large- scale waste heat recovery. Nearly two-thirds of all the energy produced in the world is lost as heat. More than half the energy in a gallon of gas leaves auto- mobiles as waste heat. Waste heat is a free source of energy that is almost wholly unused today because large-scale waste heat recovery has not been feasible. But Berkeley Lab has achieved a major advance in developing a new thermoelectric material made with an inexpensive, safe, and abundant element.

3. A team of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley resear- chers including Alex Zettl, Jean Fréchet, David Okawa and Stefan Pastine used light-responsive carbon nanotubes to create the first cost-efficient, remotely triggerable, impermeable microcapsules. Chemicals on Demand microcapsules rupture and release their contents when exposed to laser light. These smart microcapsules consist of nylon spheres about the size of a grain of sand that enclose a liquid chemical sprinkled with carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes convert laser light to heat that bursts the