In 2014, the startup company Roost introduced the Roost Smart Battery with a built-in Wi-Fi module, designed to permanently solve the problem of smoke detectors triggering when the battery is low, which has become a real nightmare for some homeowners.

The module with a 9-volt battery of the Krona type, costing $ 35, is simply inserted into a standard smoke or carbon monoxide detector, and in case of an emergency notifies the owner about it, sending him a message on the smartphone. Although the device performs only this one function, it copes with it with a bang.

The Roost Smart Battery doesn’t look pretentious, and you don’t need to, because when you install it in a smoke detector, you don’t have to look at it regularly. It looks like an ordinary Krona with standard terminals, its white case with blue ends is decorated ...

“The solar battery can be glued to anything from portable power supplies for gadgets to smart clothes and even autonomous space suits of astronauts,” said Xiaolin Zheng, an article published in Scientific Reports.

The combination of thin-film electronics with new solar panels will open up possibilities for creating new technical devices, and this is only the first stage in the development of this technology. The technology “tear off and decal” can be used completely versatile, assured the head of the team of physicists at Stanford University Xiaolin Zheng.

Zheng with like-minded people developed and reproduced real solar-battery stickers, which were the result of experiments with films of silicon oxide and nickel of nanometer thickness. Scientists explain that solar panels can traditionally work fine ...

University of Washington engineers have developed a technology that allows you to use Wi-Fi as an energy source for powering portable devices and charging gadgets. The technology has already been recognized by Popular Science magazine as one of the best innovations of 2015.

The ubiquitous adoption of wireless data technology has revolutionized itself, and now it’s the turn of wireless power transmission over the air, which developers at the University of Washington called PoWiFi (from Power Over WiFi).

At the testing stage, the researchers were able to successfully charge small-capacity lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries using the Asus RT-AC68U router and several sensors located at a distance of 8.5 meters from it. These sensors just convert energy ...

A team of engineers from several universities has developed something that in the future will help solve the problem of late discharge of batteries from portable electronic devices such as cell phones, smartphones, tablets and others. Gadgets can be recharged literally on the go, eliminating the need to connect to an outlet using an electric wire.

Nano generators built directly into the case or in the case of a mobile device will collect and convert the energy of vibration of a surface, such as the passenger seat of a moving car, into electricity and charge the battery of a mobile device, such as a smartphone. Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Xudong Wang, believes that the development of this idea will lead to the creation of self-charging personal electronics. Nanogenerator basically uses a piezoelectric polymer material ...

On October 4, 2011, in the Spanish town of Fuentes de Andalucia, in the province of Seville, the opening ceremony of the world's first commercial tower solar power station Gemasolar took place.

The construction of this grandiose project, designed and built by the engineers of the Spanish SENAR group, with the support of Masdar Power (UAE), cost their joint venture Torresol Energy more than 170 million euros. A number of leading European financial institutions, including Banco Popular, Banesto, ICO and the European Investment Bank, also participated in financing the project.

The peculiarity of this power plant is that it is able to generate clean electricity around the clock, both day and night, despite the lack of sunlight at night. This is made possible thanks to the special thermal salt technology ...

The record holder for efficiency among solar panels, one of the one way or another available on the market today, are solar panels based on multilayer solar cells developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany. Since 2005, Soitec has been engaged in their commercial implementation.

The size of the photocells themselves does not exceed 4 millimeters, and focusing of sunlight on them is achieved by using auxiliary concentrating lenses, thanks to which saturated sunlight is converted into electricity with an efficiency reaching 47%. The battery contains four pn junctions so that four different photocell links can efficiently receive and convert radiation with a specific wavelengthfrom sunlight concentrated at 297.3 times in the wavelength range ...

Since the end of February 2013, a group of scientists from Kogakuin University of Japan, six people led by Professor Sato, have been developing and implementing an innovative idea - an almost transparent lithium-ion battery.

Finally, after two and a half years, namely on August 27, 2015, at the Innovation Japan 2015 exhibition held in Tokyo, the researchers presented to the general public a working prototype, a translucent battery that can be charged from light with different wavelengths, from red to near ultraviolet .

Thin films of the electrodes of the anode and cathode, 90 and 80 nanometers thick, respectively, turned out to be almost transparent. The longer the wavelength of the charging light, the more transparent the film electrodes remain after charging ...

A group of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, under the leadership of Yu Guihua, created a flexible electric circuit based on a special gel, which, if cut into two, is completely self-healing and resumes its original electrical conductivity.

The new gel has a combination of properties that were not previously met together, it is flexibility, high electrical conductivity, and the ability to self-repair at room temperature. Such a solution opens up a wide range of possible applications: flexible electronics, robotics, electric batteries, and even soft artificial leather and biomimetic prostheses.

The property of the new gel is provided by two gel-like constituents of its substance: a supramolecular gel (or “supergel”), and a matrix of a conductive polymer hydrogel into which a supramolecular gel is introduced ...