Chris Giebink, associate professor of electrical engineering at Penn State, has been awarded a two-year, $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for his research in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The research is focused on increasing the efficiency of OLEDs used for room lighting.
Antireflection (AR) coatings on plastics have a multitude of practical applications, including glare reduction on eyeglasses, computer monitors and the display on your smart-phone when outdoors. Now, researchers at Penn State have developed an AR coating that improves on existing coatings to the extent that it can make transparent plastics, such as Plexiglas, virtually invisible.
Penn State researchers are developing a range of innovative technologies to harvest the sustainable energy of natural processes to power our future. Part one of a five-part series.
Since their invention in 1962, semiconductor diode lasers have revolutionized communications and made possible information storage and retrieval in CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray devices. These diode lasers use inorganic semiconductors grown in elaborate high vacuum systems. Now, a team of researchers from Penn State and Princeton University have taken a big step toward creating a diode laser from a hybrid organic-inorganic material that can be deposited from solution on a laboratory benchtop.
A concentrating photovoltaic system with embedded microtracking can produce over 50 percent more energy per day than standard silicon solar cells in a head-to-head competition, according to a team of engineers who field tested a prototype unit over two sunny days last fall.
Electrical engineer Chris Giebink has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project, “Non-Hermitian Organic Photonics.”
Penn State's College of Engineering recently awarded funding to four projects through its Multidisciplinary Research Seed Grants program.
Robert Collins, associate professor of computer science and engineering at Penn State, and Chris Giebink, Charles K. Etner Early Career Professor of Electrical Engineering at Penn State, were recently selected to receive the Joel and Ruth Spira Excellence in Teaching Award. Established with an endowment by the Lutron Foundation in honor of the company's founders, the award recognizes individuals who excel in the classroom by helping students learn, understand and apply the fundamentals of engineering.
Fixed-tilt concentrating photovoltaic panels that will deliver significantly more energy than conventional photovoltaic solar panels are the aim of Penn State's solar energy research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) for $2.9 million.
Converting sunlight into electricity is not economically attractive because of the high cost of solar cells, but a recent, purely optical approach to improving luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) may ease the problem, according to researchers at Argonne National Laboratories and Penn State. Using concentrated sunlight reduces the cost of solar power by requiring fewer solar cells to generate a given amount of electricity. LSCs concentrate light by absorbing and re-emiting it at lower frequency within the confines of a transparent slab of material. They can not only collect direct sunlight, but on cloudy days, can collect diffuse light as well. The material then guides the light to the slab's edges, where photovoltaic cells convert the energy to electricity.
