Tag: industry news

Why does this not surprise us? Just two weeks after the US Navy announced a major research partnership to ramp up its solar power and other clean energy programs, the Barclays credit strategy team has warned that the solar market is likely to “disrupt the status quo” for the electric utility industry sooner rather than later. We’re not surprised because

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A new, futuristic-looking car has appeared on London’s streets. It is the Vauxhall Ampera, called the Chevrolet Volt in the U.S.; an electric-powered family saloon, which uses an onboard 1.4 litre petrol engine to recharge its batteries. The result is a usable car – 0-60 in ten seconds and around a 300 mile range – which achieves over a 100

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Lithium-sulfur batteries pack up to four times more energy than lithium-ion batteries – and could allow electric-vehicle drivers to go longer distances without needing to recharge. Standing in the way of this promise, however, is the short lifetime of existing lithium-sulfur batteries. Scientists at the U.S. Dept, of Energy’sPacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have created a new cathode material that

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NEI Corporation is developing a lithium-ion battery where the electrolytes are dissolved in water instead of an organic solvent. The aqueous-based lithium-ion battery has the potential to eliminate the risks associated with state of the art lithium-ion batteries, where the organic solvents are highly flammable. In the event of a battery overcharge or a short circuit, the organic solvents pose

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When we meet someone who hasn’t seen an electric bicycle in a while, we pull out our mobile phone – not to make a call, but to make a point. Today’s electric bikes are sleek and stylish, as high-performance as they are environmentally friendly. For commuting or recreation, consumers can get a long-range, long-lasting e-bike at a reasonable price. A

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When it comes to flat packed items as well as going green, you cannot get any more larger scale than the folks over at IKEA themselves. For sure it is not one of the most perfect companies out there,but they so happen to be ahead of other large corporations that do not sell just green products as part of their

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The long life of lithium ion batteries makes them the rechargeable of choice for everything from implantable medical devices to wearable consumer electronics. But lithium ion batteries rely on liquid chemistries involving lithium salts dissolved in organic solvents, creating flame risks that would be avoided if the cells were completely solid-state. Now a team of researchers at Tohoku University in

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Power Integrations, Inc. today announced its LYTSwitch™-2 family of isolated LED drivers. The new IC family, which delivers up to 12W of accurately controlled output power, substantially reduces component count, resulting in simpler, smaller, more reliable LED lighting designs. LYTSwitch-2 LED-driver ICs use primary-side control, resulting in cost-effective, single-sided PCBs with low component counts. In addition, driver isolation allows the

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Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) today announced that it has enhanced its portfolio of photocouplers with the addition of a smart gate driver photocouplerk with a peak output current of 4A. Housed in a thin SO16L package, the new TLP5214 is suited to driving medium-power IGBTs and power MOSFETs. Used to protect circuits between electronic devices or to block noise

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Adding to its portfolio of SafeTI™ design components, today Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) introduced its latest 32-bit dual-core lockstep Hercules™ RM57Lx and TMS570LCx microcontrollers (MCUs) for developers’ functional safety applications. Unique to the Hercules MCU platform, these two new floating-point devices offer a 50 percent increase in computational performance over any of TI’s current ARM® Cortex™-R MCUs, allowing system designers

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