Press Clips

Could the Future Be Powered by Salt? This Researcher Thinks It's Possible

Inverse | December 8, 2018

If battery innovation were a cocktail party, lithium ion would be the one sucking up all the oxygen in the room, telling too many jokes and barely letting anyone get a word in edge wise. But these lithium ion batteries aren't perfect, explains Shirley Meng, a nanoengineering professor at the University of California San Diego. They're expensive and require the use of cobalt, which can sometimes be a conflict mineral. Meng and colleagues recently started looking into the question of whether our infatuation with lithium ion might be overshadowing other more promising areas of battery research. Full Story

Batteries made from sodium would be cheap yet powerful

Earth.com | December 4, 2018

Today's Video of the Day from the National Science Foundation (NSF) describes the potential for batteries made from sodium, which would be cheaper and more powerful than lithium batteries. Materials scientist Shirley Meng of the University of California San Diego is leading a research team that has a vision of making sodium batteries a reality. The study is supported by the Ceramics Program within the Division of Materials Research at NSF. Full Story

The chemical search for better white light

C&EN | November 19, 2018

To make LEDs that produce more natural-looking light, scientists are developing new phosphors. These are inorganic compounds applied to the dome-shaped cap covering an LED that alter the light emitted, giving it a more pleasing hue. Efforts to discover new phosphors have nearly always occurred through painstaking, trial-and-error experiments--for example, by using exploratory crystal-growth methods and combinatorial chemistry. A new study led by UC San Diego's Joanna McKittrick and Shyue Ping Ong suggests that computational screening may one day put the kibosh on the lab-intensive approach. Full Story

Flexible solar panels could be just as efficient as traditional solar panels.

Hydrogen Fuel News | August 1, 2018

A team of scientists from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are working on a way to develop a "solar tarp;" flexible solar panels that would be as efficient as a silicon solar panel but also lightweight, thin and bendable. Full Story

A Packable Solar Panel Design May Be the Key to Harnessing the Sun's Energy

Inverse | July 31, 2018

Darren Lipomi's research group at UC San Diego is working to develop flexible solar panels, which would be as efficient as a silicon panel, but would be thin, lightweight, and bendable. This sort of device, which we call a "solar tarp," could be spread out to the size of a room and generate electricity from the sun, and it could be balled up to be the size of a grapefruit and stuffed in a backpack as many as 1,000 times without breaking. Full Story