Weighing about as much as two grains of rice but with the energy density of a much larger, heavier battery, the researchers’ packing-free design could enable a host of otherwise impossible electronics. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
Packaging-free design quadruples microbatteries’ energy density
New research from the School of Engineering and Applied Science shows a new way to build and package microbatteries that maximizes energy density even at the smallest sizes.
The researchers’ new platform technology, called Very Large Scale Microfluidic Integration, allows tens of thousands of microfluidic units to be incorporated into a single three-dimensionally etched silicon-and-glass wafer. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
New microfluidic device delivers mRNA nanoparticles a hundred times faster
With a “liquid assembly line,” Penn researchers have produced mRNA-delivering-nanoparticles significantly faster than standard microfluidic technologies.
This strip of metallic wood, about an inch long and one-third inch wide, is thinner than household aluminum foil but is supporting more than 50 times its own weight without buckling. If the weight was suspended from it, the same strip could support more than six pounds without breaking. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
Growing ‘metallic wood’ to new heights
“Metallic wood” is full of regularly spaced cell-sized pores that radically decrease its density without sacrificing the material’s strength, which not only gives metallic wood the strength of titanium at a fraction of the weight, but unique optical properties.
Paving the way for ‘next-generation’ lithium-ion batteries
A new study from Penn Engineering details the complex electrochemical process that causes certain types of batteries to degrade, insights that could aid in the design of longer lasting, more efficient batteries in the future.
An illustration and electron microscope image of the researchers’ FE-FET device. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
Engineers pave way for chip components that could serve as both RAM and ROM
The hurdle for making individual chip component devices has always been in manufacturing high-temperature ferroelectric materials. Now a team of researchers at the School of Engineering and Applied Science has shown a potential way around this problem.
Ring microlasers are eyed as potential light sources for photonic applications, but they first must be made more powerful. Combining multiple microlasers into an array solves only half of the problem, as this adds noisy “modes” to the resulting laser light. Penn Engineers have achieved single-mode lasing from such an array. By calculating the necessary properties for “superpartners” placed around the primary array, they can cancel out the unwanted extra modes. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
Paving the way for new light-powered devices
By combining cutting-edge concepts from theoretical physics, researchers from Penn Engineering developed “sypersymmetric microlaser arrays” that are both stable and have high power density.
The “metal-eating” robot can follow a metal path without using a computer or needing a battery. By wiring the power-supplying units to the wheels on the opposite side, the robot autonomously navigates away from the tape and towards aluminum surfaces. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
Even without a brain, metal-eating robots can search for food
SEAS engineers are developing robot-powered technology with energy sources that are harvested in the robot’s environment.
A computer model of a mutated anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK), a known oncogenic driver in pediatric neuroblastoma. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
Computational insights towards future personalized cancer treatments
Researchers from Penn Engineering, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Yale University use molecular simulations to uncover how mutations in a class of enzymes known as kinases lead to cancer progression.
Working in the Bargatin Group’s lab, Mohsen Azadi wields a scalpel while preparing a photophoretic levitation experiment. Unlike the microscopic particles that have been previously levitated with this techniques, the researchers’ flyers are big enough to manipulated by hand. (Image: Eric Sucar)
Researchers reach new heights with light-based levitation
Penn researchers are working to engineer nanoscale features on ultra-lightweight materials, finding the ideal combination that will allow those materials to lift themselves into the air using the energy provided by light.
Penn Engineering undergraduate Niko Simpkins. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)
Niko Simpkins: At the nexus of engineering and music
For Niko Simpkins, a musician who performs, produces, and engineers his own tracks, the most exciting processes combine structure and flexibility, creativity, and rigor. As a third-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, he sees his mechanical engineering education as a framework for problem solving that might serve him across a broad set of endeavors, and for now, he’s more interested in learning than narrowing to any one particular career path.
