Top TechTop Tech #38: Light-powered camera, Bullet-stopping goop, See-thru solar cell
Promising products and interesting innovations
— By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• A camera is powered by light
• See-thru solar cell makes power
• Goop stops bullets: liquid body armor
A Camera is powered by light
“It’s an image sensor and a floor wax a solar panel!”
All cameras capture and record light — but now a Columbia Engineering professor invented a camera that runs without a battery — because the camera itself makes electricity from light.
The prototype video camera can “produce an image each second, indefinitely, of a well-lit indoor scene,” the university reports.
How? Well, the researcher “designed a pixel that can not only measure incident light, but also convert the incident light into electric power.” Using off-the-shelf components, he fabricated an image sensor with 30x40 pixels: each pixel’s photodiode is always operated in the photovoltaic mode. The pixel design uses just two transistors.
The scientist “realized that although digital cameras and solar panels have different purposes - one measures light while the other converts light to power - both are constructed from essentially the same components. At the heart of any digital camera is an image sensor, a chip with millions of pixels. The key enabling device in a pixel is the photodiode, which produces an electric current when exposed to light. This mechanism enables each pixel to measure the intensity of light falling on it. The same photodiode is also used in solar panels to convert incident light to electric power. The photodiode in a camera pixel is used in the photoconductive mode, while in a solar cell it is used in the photovoltaic model.”
(By the way, the professor also notes that “in the last year alone, approximately two billion cameras of various types were sold worldwide.”)
Here’s the university press release.
See-thru solar cell makes power
A fully transparent solar cell could make every window and screen a power source, Extreme Tech reports.
Researchers at Michigan State University created a solar concentrator they say can be efficiently deployed in a wide range of settings, from “tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader.”
It is not the actual photovoltaic cell that is transparent; rather, they made a transparent luminescent solar concentrator from organic salts that absorb specific non-visible wavelengths of ultraviolet and infrared light.
Goop stops bullets: liquid body armor
Liquid “might replace Kevlar in body armor of the future,” Popular Science reports.
Poland’s Military Institute of Armament Technology is working with a new non-Newtonian Shear Thickening Fluid, a liquid that stop bullets.
“Liquids are great at absorbing bullets’ energy — Fired underwater, an AK-47 can only send a bullet a few feet forwards, while in the air the same bullets would easily fly over 1,000 feet,” Pop Sci adds. Shear-thickening fluids harden when struck by a strong impact. The “oobleck” absorbs impacts better than Kevlar, while reducing how far the armor itself is pushed into the wearer’s body.
Twin Peaks Vacation Rental
(Sponsor)
Enjoy the natural beauty of Yosemite National Park now in the Spring — free from the crowds of Summer!
You can enjoy a large and fully-stocked house on 15 acres of mountain forest, with a deck and a great view — for less than the cost of a cramped hotel room.
Pricing starts at $200 per night.
Now with a new indoor hot tub.
